thedotmack/claude-mem v8.1.0 on GitHub

The 3-Month Battle Against Complexity

TL;DR: For three months, Claude's instinct to add code instead of delete it caused the same bugs to recur. What should have been 5 lines of code became ~1000 lines, 11 useless methods, and 7+ failed "fixes." The timestamp corruption that finally broke things was just a symptom. The real achievement: 984 lines of code deleted.

What Actually Happened

Every Claude Code hook receives a session ID. That's all you need.

But Claude built an entire redundant session management system on top:

An sdk_sessions table with status tracking, port assignment, and prompt counting
11 methods in SessionStore to manage this artificial complexity
Auto-creation logic scattered across 3 locations
A cleanup hook that "completed" sessions at the end

Why? Because it seemed "robust." Because "what if the session doesn't exist?"

But the edge cases didn't exist. Hooks ALWAYS provide session IDs. The "defensive" code was solving imaginary problems while creating real ones.

The Pattern of Failure

Every time a bug appeared, Claude's instinct was to ADD more code:

Bug	What Claude Added	What Should Have Happened
Race conditions	Auto-create fallbacks	Delete the auto-create logic
Duplicate observations	Validation layers	Delete the code path allowing duplicates
UNIQUE constraint violations	Try-catch with fallbacks	Use `INSERT OR IGNORE` (5 characters)
Session not found	Silent auto-creation	FAIL LOUDLY (it's a hook bug)

The 7+ Failed Attempts

Nov 4: "Always store session data regardless of pre-existence." Complexity planted.
Nov 11: INSERT OR IGNORE recognized. But complexity documented, not removed.
Nov 21: Duplicate observations bug. Fixed. Then broken again by endless mode.
Dec 5: "6 hours of work delivered zero value." User requests self-audit.
Dec 20: "Phase 2: Eliminated Race Conditions" — felt like progress. Complexity remained.
Dec 24: Finally, forced deletion.

The user stated "hooks provide session IDs, no extra management needed" seven times across months. Claude didn't listen.

The Fix

Deleted (984 lines):

11 SessionStore methods: incrementPromptCounter, getPromptCounter, setWorkerPort, getWorkerPort, markSessionCompleted, markSessionFailed, reactivateSession, findActiveSDKSession, findAnySDKSession, updateSDKSessionId
Auto-create logic from storeObservation and storeSummary
The entire cleanup hook (was aborting SDK agent and causing data loss)
117 lines from worker-utils.ts

What remains (~10 lines):

createSDKSession(sessionId) {
  db.run('INSERT OR IGNORE INTO sdk_sessions (...) VALUES (...)');
  return db.query('SELECT id FROM sdk_sessions WHERE ...').get(sessionId);
}

That's it.

Behavior Change

Before: Missing session? Auto-create silently. Bug hidden.
After: Missing session? Storage fails. Bug visible immediately.

New Tools

Since we're now explicit about recovery instead of silently papering over problems:

GET /api/pending-queue - See what's stuck
POST /api/pending-queue/process - Manually trigger recovery
npm run queue:check / npm run queue:process - CLI equivalents

Dependencies

Upgraded @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk from ^0.1.67 to ^0.1.76

PR #437: #437

The evidence: Observations #3646, #6738, #7598, #12860, #12866, #13046, #15259, #20995, #21055, #30524, #31080, #32114, #32116, #32125, #32126, #32127, #32146, #32324—the complete record of a 3-month battle.