A practical technical note, presented separately from our published academic papers.
Keep the project coherent across sessions.
This technical note applies explicit state, version control, separation of concerns and reproducibility to long-running work with AI agents. It distinguishes subagent orchestration from independent sessions coordinated by a person.
Design ownership and continuity into the work.
The relevant decisions concern which records survive a session, who may change each file and how an interrupted job resumes. The Producer–Composer arrangement is one described approach, not a universal organisational requirement.
A practice-based account with worked examples.
The note provides conventions, a worked example and templates. It does not report a controlled evaluation of the workflow, and no publication date is printed in the supplied document.
Editorial context · The source paper remains the reference.
A long project cannot depend on a conversation remembering everything. This technical note applies explicit state, version control, separation of concerns and reproducibility to work that spans multiple AI-agent sessions.
Keep decisions, current state and resumable work in project files.
Distinguish one agent orchestrating subagents from independent terminals working side by side.
Make file ownership and handoffs explicit before running concurrent work.
Move project memory into files
The paper describes conversation context as finite, volatile and private to a session. A project folder gives a new session a durable starting point. Recording decisions while work proceeds reduces the need to reconstruct them after a reset.
Separate production from composition
A Producer maintains source material and project memory, while a Composer creates the deliverable. In the arrangement described, a person relays information between the two and file ownership stays disjoint. The purpose is to make each role’s authority and inputs legible.
Make concurrent work resumable
Independent terminals introduce coordination risks that differ from subagent orchestration. The note combines explicit ownership with version control, recorded inputs and a ledger for long-running jobs, so an interrupted task can resume without repeating completed work.
A practical engineering account
The document offers conventions, failure modes, a worked example and templates. It is a practical account of organising multi-session projects, rather than a measured comparison of tools. No publication date appears in the supplied document.
Cite this paper
Giuseppe Destefanis. (n.d.). Engineering Claude Code for Long-Lived, Multi-Session Projects. Technical note.
GD
University College London
Giuseppe Destefanis is an Associate Professor in UCL’s Department of Computer Science. His research spans empirical software engineering, mining software repositories and large language models. He uses data mining, machine learning and natural language processing to study how people, technical systems and economic incentives interact across digital platforms.