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DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

← All of v2.1.38 Home All releases ←olderv2.1.37 v2.1.39newer→
Claude Code v2.1.38

Auto-Memory (Research Preview)

What

Claude can now automatically learn and remember patterns across sessions, writing insights to a persistent memory directory.

Activation: Auto-memory has a three-layer activation cascade (checked in order):

  1. Environment variable (highest priority): CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_AUTO_MEMORY=true forces off, =false forces on
  2. User setting: autoMemoryEnabled in ~/.claude/settings.json (per-project, overrides the feature flag)
  3. GrowthBook feature flag tengu_oboe (default fallback): server-side rollout control, defaults to false

If the flag is off for your account and you haven't set the user setting, auto-memory is disabled by default. Remote sessions (CLAUDE_CODE_REMOTE=true) also disable it unless CLAUDE_CODE_REMOTE_MEMORY_DIR is set.

How to enable: The toggle is in the /memory panel (not /settings). Type /memory to see "Auto-memory (research preview): off" at the top, then confirm to toggle it on. This writes autoMemoryEnabled: true to settings, overriding the feature flag. After enabling, "Open auto-memory folder" and per-agent memory entries also appear in the /memory panel.

Note: The feature flag tengu_oboe existed in v2.1.37 but with no user-facing toggle — auto-memory was purely server-gated. v2.1.38 added the autoMemoryEnabled setting, the /memory panel toggle, and the bidirectional env var override, making it opt-in for everyone.

Details
  • Per-project setting: autoMemoryEnabled controls whether Claude reads/writes to auto-memory
  • Memory guidance updated from "write down key learnings as you complete tasks" to "save patterns worth preserving across sessions"
  • New guidelines for what to save:
  • Stable patterns and conventions confirmed across multiple interactions
  • User preferences for workflow, tools, and communication style
  • Key architectural decisions and important file paths
  • Solutions to recurring problems and debugging insights
  • What NOT to save:
  • Session-specific context (current task details, in-progress work)
  • Speculative conclusions from reading a single file
  • Information that duplicates CLAUDE.md instructions
  • Supports explicit user requests: "always use bun", "never auto-commit", or "forget X"
Evidence

Activation logic (search for tengu_oboe), settings schema (search for "Enable auto-memory for this project"), /memory panel toggle (search for "Auto-memory (research preview):")

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

Related

Other releases about the same thing. Found by shared names or similar wording; neither means one caused the other.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.38 →