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Equation 1 · Part 12 · How Claude Code's Memory Actually Persists Across Sessions

superscript

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
superscript

What this part means

A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.

Its job in the formula

A raised mark can be a power or an index. Its position and the surrounding notation determine which.

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

An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.

Open the illustrated exponents: repeated multiplication and powers guide →

Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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