Claude’s memory is scattered across more places than most people realize — and which memories follow you around depends entirely on how you’re using it. A standalone chat draws on your account-level memory; a chat inside a Project draws on that Project’s own store instead. Claude Code running in WSL keeps a set of notes your Windows-side Claude Code never sees. Claude Code on the web reads only the repo’s CLAUDE.md and nothing else. Cowork has its own per-project memory again.

I kept having to re-derive all of this from memory — ironically — every time someone asked me “wait, will it remember that?” So I built a small thing to answer the question once: an interactive map of every place Claude stores something, and how it flows in and out.

Check the ways you actually use Claude and the diagram composes itself — no pre-baked variants, it’s generated live from your selection. There’s a scope lens to ask the two questions that usually matter (“what follows me across projects?” vs. “what stays put?”), and a toggle for the full, official Anthropic terminology when you want the precise names rather than the friendly ones. It’s one self-contained page; nothing you check is sent anywhere.

The permanent home is here — Claude Memory Map — and it’s embedded below so you can poke at it without leaving the page:

Trouble with the embed? Open the full-page version →

The whole thing is open source — the code is on GitHub — and every store, edge, and label traces back to documented Anthropic behavior (where the docs and the shipping app disagreed, the app won). If you spot something that’s drifted out of date, a pull request or a note is very welcome.