The gotcha nobody tells you about running more than one AI, and the fix that turned out to be better than what I was reaching for.
I had two Macs running, each with its own Claude working away, and I did the most natural thing in the world: I finished a piece of work on the laptop, walked over to the Mac mini, and asked its Claude to take a look at what the other one had just done.
It couldn't. It had no idea the work existed.
I knew this, intellectually. But there's a gap between knowing a thing and feeling it, and the feeling caught me off guard, because I'd been carrying around a quiet assumption I'd never examined. I'd been thinking of "Claude" the way you think of a person: one mind, that you can find in different rooms. Walk up to it anywhere and it's still it, still holding everything you've said.
That isn't how it works. And nobody really tells you, because most people only ever talk to one of them at a time.
Each session is an island. Open a new conversation, or a new app, or move to a second machine, and you get a fresh mind with the memory of a goldfish about everything that happened next door. They don't share a brain. They never did. The moment you try to run more than one, which is exactly what you do the second you get ambitious, you smack straight into it.
My first instinct was the wrong one, and I suspect it's everyone's. I tried to fix it with effort. Elaborate handover notes. "Here's everything you need to know" documents. A diligent little ritual of catching one session up on what another had done. It half-worked, the way carrying water in your hands half-works. And it kept springing leaks. The cleverest handover in the world is no good if it points at a file that lives on the other machine, which the session reading it can't open. I'd built a beautiful set of instructions to a locked room.
The reframe, when it came, was the same lesson this whole AI journey keeps teaching me in different clothes: stop trying to be the heroic single thread holding it all together.
I stopped trying to give them one memory. I gave them a shared board instead.
One place (for me it's a Notion workspace, but the tool isn't the point) that every session reads when it wakes up and writes to as it works. Not memory inside any of them. Memory outside all of them, that they all reach. The laptop's Claude finishes a piece and posts it to the board. The mini's Claude opens the board and reads it. No handover ritual. No locked rooms. The islands didn't need to become one landmass. They needed a shared harbour.
And here's the part I didn't expect: it's better than the thing I was originally reaching for.
A single long-running session, one mind that remembers everything, sounds like the dream, until it crashes, or fills up, or you close the laptop lid and lose the lot. I'd had that happen. Hours of context, gone, because it all lived in one fragile place. The shared-board version has none of that fear in it. Any session can die. A machine can sleep. I can walk away for two hours. When anything comes back, it rebuilds its whole picture from the board in seconds, because the truth was never in the session; it was in the place they all share. It survives me. It survives them.
There's something almost moral in it, if you'll let me reach. So much of my old way of working — the business, the marriage years, the wilderness — was me trying to hold everything in one head, mine, by sheer effort, terrified that if I let go it would all fall. It mostly did fall, eventually, the way held breath always does. The thing that actually held was never the heroic grip. It was writing it down somewhere outside myself, where it couldn't be lost when I faltered.
The machines taught me that again this week, in an afternoon, by being honest about a limitation I'd been papering over.
So if you ever go past one AI (and you will, the moment you get serious) here's the gotcha, free: they don't share a brain. Don't waste a week trying to give them one. Give them a board. Let each be an island, and build the harbour they all sail into.
The briefing is the work. It turns out the shared briefing is the magic.
I'm writing up exactly how to stand up your own version (the machine you actually need, the lanes, the guardrails, the shared board, the prompts) as Build Your Own Multi-Lane Claude CoPilot. Want the early version? The signup's at creativepath52.com.
— Damian
