{"slug": "i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them", "title": "I kept 15 reference files for four weeks and never opened them", "summary": "A developer built a recall system on top of Claude that converts stored reference notes into open-ended questions, after finding that 15 reference files generated over four weeks were never reopened because asking the model directly was faster. After a two-week break in October, the developer reports that 19 of 29 questions were fully correct, 9 partially correct and 1 missed, with 9 of the 10 flagged items fully recovered four days later.", "body_md": "During my learning sessions, I told Claude to store all lessons, rules and standards that stood out. I never specified where to save them, and I never really checked them, because asking Claude was always faster.\n\nIt generated 15 files that held the answers I kept asking Claude for. So, I designed a new system that changes the goal from only storing to also recalling. Now Claude turns the same information into open-ended questions.\n\nI answer 3 of those questions cold every morning (without looking anything up), a whole topic every Saturday, and full recall at the end of the month.\n\nThree days after I “understood” pass-by-value in Java, the morning question was: a method gets a dog named “Rex”, renames it “Max”, then swaps in a brand-new dog. What prints? I said “Rex”, because I thought the method couldn’t touch the caller’s object. It printed “Max”. A method can’t change which object you point to, but it can change the object itself.\n\nAs a QA, I was testing my own knowledge, the same way I test software: outside the conditions it was built in.\n\nThe system showed me the gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew. This question appeared several more times in different forms, and eventually I got it right, with the full explanation.\n\nThe biggest test came in October. Due to personal reasons I put my learning on pause for 2 weeks, and I wanted to see how much I still remembered when I got back.\n\nTwo-thirds were still there: 19 questions were fully right, 9 were partially right (meaning some details were missing), and only 1 was missed. The rest told me exactly what to re-learn, and 4 days later 9 out of the 10 came back fully right, and one was partially right.\n\nThe 15 files that I never opened became questions that I answer every day. What’s the last note you wrote that you actually opened again?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/lenzz920/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them-4dg", "published_at": "2026-11-06 13:21:14+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-06 13:23:45.984300+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "large-language-models", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Claude", "Anthropic", "Java"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-kept-15-reference-files-for-four-weeks-and-never-opened-them.jsonld"}}