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Equation 1 · Part 5 · How Claude Code's Memory Actually Persists Across Sessions

Symbol T_tools

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
TtoolsT_{\mathrm{tools}}

What this part means

TtT_tools is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

TtT_tools is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

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

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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