If you use Claude Code on a real project for more than one-off coding tasks, you eventually hit the same wall:

the model is good at solving the task in front of it, but every new session still has to reconstruct the project.

For me, that got especially annoying in a solo-dev monorepo. I was not just asking Claude to write code. I was also using it for:

backlog triage

bug capture

planning the next task

weekly status summaries

preserving decisions across sessions

At some point I realized I was trying to solve a workflow problem with a better prompt.

That was the wrong move.

What helped was building a thin project-ops layer around Claude Code instead.

My current version uses Jira MCP for backlog work, Confluence for published reports, a local JSON context DB for working memory, maintainer docs for durable context, and a few commands like /standup , /bug , and /rfe .

Then I pulled the reusable parts into a public starter repo without shipping the private project details around them.

The repo is…