Look around this website and write in the notes what you find: which system
it runs, where the theme files are, which plugins matter and what I should
never delete here.
A new chat with the assistant starts empty. It does not know what you did together last week, and it does not know that the folder with old files is there for a reason. That is why every website on your account has its own set of notes. It reads them at the start of every chat, before it begins on your instruction. It is the difference between an assistant that has to search every time and one that already knows your site.
Where the notes live
The notes belong to a website, not to a chat. They sit outside the web root of that site. That is a deliberate choice with two consequences worth knowing: visitors cannot request them, and they do not travel along in your git repository. So you can write down how things really work without it ending up on the internet.
You view and edit them in the assistant through the Notes panel. If you prefer the terminal, you need to do nothing extra: a session you start over SSH or from the terminal in the panel gets the same notes. If you use Codex instead of Claude, it reads the same file.
Alongside the per website notes, the assistant knows a set of account facts: which package you have, which websites are on your account, where things live on our servers. The platform fills those in. You do not have to maintain them.
The first time: let it look around
For a website without notes, the assistant offers to look around. One click and it walks through the site: which system runs it, how the folders fit together, which theme is active, which plugins or packages are involved. It writes the result into the notes.
For an empty domain it works the other way round. Then it asks a few questions about the business, the goal of the site and the pages you want. Those answers also end up in the notes, so the site that comes out of it does not feel like a stranger in the next chat.
This is the step people skip. Do it once, at the start, and every chat after that is shorter.
What you put in yourself
The best notes are short and cover decisions, not technical details it can see for itself. Think of:
- Agreements. "The brand colour is this blue, never use another one." "Titles always as a question plus an answer."
- Boundaries. "Never delete the folder with old invoices, it is still needed." "Do not touch this form, the bookkeeper handles it."
- Context you cannot read anywhere. "This site moved in August." "The old addresses are still in Google, so the redirects have to stay."
- Who decides what. "New copy comes to me first, do not publish it."
And what does not belong there: passwords, keys and tokens. Not because the file is poorly protected, but because it is a place you deliberately share and often copy. For credentials, use the places meant for them.
It writes in them too
The assistant may update the notes itself, without bothering you with an approval card. That is pleasant, because it keeps them current after a rebuild. It has a downside too: nonsense can creep in, for example an assumption it made that you never confirmed.
Hence the habit we recommend: read the panel once a month, or after a big job. If something no longer holds, remove it. A note that is wrong is worse than no note, because it starts from that assumption in every chat.
Every task starts over
This is the point we only properly understood while building our own demo sites. We gave the assistant four instructions in a row, each in a new chat. Everything it had worked out in instruction 1 was gone by instruction 2, except what was in the notes.
The practical lesson: end a big instruction with "write in the notes what you did and what is still open". Then the next instruction is a continuation instead of a restart. If you really want to carry on in the same chat, you can resume an earlier conversation; that is something other than the notes and keeps the whole thread.
Emptying them means deleting them
In the panel, saving the notes empty removes the file. That is handy when you want a clean slate, and a trap when you only meant to tidy up. Copy the text somewhere first if you still want to be able to look it up.
Common mistakes
"It forgets everything we agreed." Agreements in the chat are agreements for that chat. Put them in the notes and they hold tomorrow as well.
"I put three pages in there and now it behaves oddly." The notes travel along as the starting point of every chat. The longer they are, the more contradictions creep in and the less weight each line carries. Keep it to the things a stranger could not guess.
"There is something in there I never said." That happens: it updates them itself. Remove it and add the right answer if needed.
"I looked for the notes in my website files." They are not there, on purpose. They sit outside the web root and you reach them through the panel in the assistant.
"I thought the notes were my previous chat." Those are two different things. The notes are a short summary of the website; resuming a conversation brings back the whole thread, including exactly what was changed. See also What if the assistant stalls.