Writer’s Brief

The Hook

An hour later you come back to 13 terminal windows and have no idea what any of them were doing.

Main Points to Cover

  1. Claude Code hooks can call Claude itself (Haiku) to generate metadata about your own sessions
  2. The statusline is a one-line dashboard you never knew you needed, and it was already built into Claude Code, just not turned on
  3. Auto-logging means you get a work diary for free, without ever writing a single entry

The Angle

Problem-solved. Started with “I can’t tell my terminals apart” and ended with AI naming its own sessions and keeping a journal of what it does.

Target Reader

Claude Code power users running multiple sessions. Anyone who’s looked at 5+ terminal tabs and thought “what was I doing in that one?”

Tone Notes

Casual, show-don’t-tell. The screenshots do the talking. Focus on the “wait, that works?” moments.

Raw Material / Moments to Write From

These are notes for Alex to write from. Not prose.

  • The problem is visceral and universal: 13 tmux sessions, all named things like “agentdeck_britt-hq_a32909e8”, come back an hour later, total amnesia
  • First attempt was whodis - scanning tmux pane scrollback for the ❯ prompt character to find what the user typed. Worked but crude.
  • The statusline was already a feature in Claude Code. It was just… off. Because settings.local.json had disableAllHooks: true buried at the bottom. Agent-deck hooks were fine (they bypass the system), but the statusline specifically checks that flag.
  • First Haiku topic attempt returned “It’s Tuesday, March 3, 2026” because it followed the CLAUDE.md “start with the date” instruction. Had to add --system-prompt to override.
  • The generated topics are surprisingly good: “Terminal session topic naming”, “Update Britts LinkedIn profile”, “Cohort 2 week one session”, “Chief of Staff operations session”
  • Topic refreshes every 20 messages so the name evolves. Session about “fix a bug” might become “refactor auth system” as the conversation shifts.
  • The auto-logger writes to Mission Control’s existing log.jsonl, tagged auto-log. You get a work diary without ever writing an entry.
  • The whole system is async hooks calling Haiku. You never see it, never wait for it. The topic just appears in the statusline after your first message.
  • Claude calling Claude to name what Claude is doing. There’s something recursive and slightly unhinged about it.