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Equation 1 · Part 10 · How Claude Code's Memory Actually Persists Across Sessions

addition

Tstart=Tsys+Tmem+Tenv+Ttools+∑i=1kMiT_{\mathrm{start}} = T_{\mathrm{sys}} + T_{\mathrm{mem}} + T_{\mathrm{env}} + T_{\mathrm{tools}} + \sum_{i=1}^{k} M_i
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

Anthropic ships an interactive walkthrough of a representative session specifically to make this loading concrete, breaking startup context down by component with illustrative token counts: a system prompt around 4,200 tokens, an auto-memory index around 680 tokens, environment information around 280 tokens, MCP tool names around 120 tokens with full schemas deferred until needed, then a global CLAUDE.md around 320 tokens and a project CLAUDE.md around 1,800 tokens in that particular worked example [ 4 ] . The documentation is careful to call these “representative numbers” rather than fixed constants — actual figures move with every project’s own files — but the shape they describe is stable…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.