Week 1: one chat to run everything
I built a command center for my Claude work. It's my fourth try, and the first three taught me what not to build.
I use Claude in three places: the desktop app, the web chat, and Claude Code on my PC. This week that caught up with me. Work was spread across all three and I couldn't tell where anything stood.
So I built a command center. One chat where I type "overview", see every project, drill into one, and act on it right there.
It's my fourth attempt. Before writing any code I went back and worked out why the first three died. That part was more useful than the build.
Why the first three died
JovePM ran exactly once, back in March. It worked. I just never set up the scheduler. Its project list was hardcoded, and several of those folders don't exist anymore.
ClaudeChief read a status file I updated by hand. I stopped updating it for three weeks. When it finally ran, it found five active projects it had never heard of, then asked me five questions before it would continue. I never answered them, so it never continued.
My inbox agent died when its Gmail login expired. The scheduled job failed and nothing told me.
Different tools, same four causes:
- State I had to keep up by hand
- A fixed list of projects, so new work was invisible
- Background jobs that fail silently
- Progress that waits on me answering questions
Even my fix for the first one went stale. A few weeks ago I made one file the single view of everything. Three weeks later it was 18 days out of date.
How it works
It's a Claude skill plus two small scripts. The rules: no background job, no hand-kept list, and it never waits on me.
No scheduler means it runs only when I ask, so it can't die quietly. If you've ever found out a month later that a cron job stopped, that's the whole reasoning.
When I say "overview", it scans my drive for folders that changed in the last 30 days, reads each project's progress notes and my money plan, checks recent chats and memory, and gives me one table: what's active, what's blocked, what's next. Folders with activity that my status file doesn't mention get flagged as untracked. That's the ClaudeChief blind spot, fixed by not having a list at all.
Anything it can't figure out shows up as an open question inside the overview, not as a gate in front of it.
Then I say "drill into X" and it goes deep on one project. Then "do it", and it acts in the same chat.
What the first run caught
My tracker said I'd done 1 money action this week. The real count, from the actual logs, was 6.
And a web chat had finished two tasks the night before that my local files still listed as blockers. The work was done. The disk didn't know.
Getting web chats to write things down
Claude Code updates a progress file at the end of every session. Web and desktop chats didn't write anything to disk. So whatever happened there just floated.
The fix is boring on purpose. Each project gets an inbox file. When I wrap a web or desktop chat, it appends a short dated note: done, decided, blocked, next. Claude Code reads the inbox at the start of its next session and folds it into the progress file. One writer per file, so nothing overwrites anything.
I first called it HANDOFF.md. An hour later I found an old project that already had a HANDOFF.md, an unrelated design brief, which Claude Code would have read as inbox notes. Renamed it to INBOX.md the same night.
Chat history is walled off
Claude's past-chat search doesn't cross projects. My workaround is a script that indexes the monthly data export into a local search database, kept outside git because it holds work and personal chats.
Requesting the export is a manual click, about 30 seconds a month. I looked at automating it, but the download needs approval every time, so an unattended run would just stall. That's how my inbox agent died, so I left it manual.
Things that went wrong
- The disk scan took 2.5 minutes. An ignore list, a cap on how deep it digs into big media folders, and git checks only on active folders got it to about a minute. I chose an ignore list over a project list on purpose. A project list is what killed JovePM.
- The chat indexer throws a "disk I/O error" when I run it from the desktop app. It works from Claude Code. Not fixed yet.
- Setting up this newsletter, I shared a screenshot that showed my API key in plain text. Rotated it, then moved the key out of the URL into a request header, which I should have done in the first place.
- I broke my own "one writer per file" rule once on night one. Caught it, moved the note to the inbox.
What I don't know yet
Whether I'll keep using it. Three earlier tools say I might not. I set myself a check for a month from now: did I open the overview at least once a week, and is my status file less than 7 days old? If not, I find out why before adding anything.
The scoreboard
The goal right now: monthly cash flow at break-even by early December. Building doesn't count toward that. Sending does.
This week: 10 out of 10 money actions. It's the first week I've hit the target. Side income is still $0.
That's week 1.
Next week: the engine that sends this email, and what broke on the way to sending it. I'm travelling, so it'll be shorter.
Jove