Why Claude Code Keeps Forgetting Your Workflow (and How Skills Fix It)

Every developer who's spent real time with Claude Code has hit this wall. You open a new session, type out the same detailed prompt you've used a dozen times — "use this file structure, follow this naming convention, always add tests" — and somewhere around the third iteration you think: there has to be a better way. There is. It's called skills, and once I started using them properly, my Claude Code sessions went from repetitive babysitting to actually productive pair programming. The Root Problem: Context Evaporates Claude Code is stateless between sessions. Your CLAUDE.md file helps with project-level context, but it's a blunt instrument. It gets loaded every time, for every task, whether relevant or not. And it doesn't compose well — you can't say "use my deployment checklist for this task but my refactoring approach for that one." The real pain shows up when you have repeatable workflows. Things like: Validating a business idea before writing code Structuring a new feature around