I’ve been using Claude Code for about a week now, and I wanted to share something that surprised me: how different it is from web-based AI tools when it comes to conversation management. Coming from Cursor’s straightforward UI, Claude Code’s terminal approach initially felt less intuitive, but it turns out to have some clever features for handling interrupted conversations and exploring different approaches.

The Reality of Interrupted Development

We’ve all been there: you’re deep in a coding session with Claude, making real progress on a feature, when suddenly you need to close your terminal for a meeting, system restart, or just to switch contexts. Traditional AI tools would leave you starting from scratch, re-explaining your entire project setup.

Claude Code changes this completely. Every conversation is automatically saved locally, preserving not just the chat history but the complete context—file states, todo lists, even the mental model of your project architecture.

Session Resumption: Your Conversation Never Really Ends

When I return to a project, I have two main options:

claude --continue picks up exactly where I left off with the most recent conversation. It’s like Claude never left—it remembers what files we were working on, what patterns we established, even what we were planning to do next.

claude --resume opens an interactive menu of previous sessions. This is incredibly useful when juggling multiple projects or when I want to continue a specific conversation thread from days ago. Each session shows a helpful summary, so I can quickly identify the right context.

The magic happens when you press ESC twice—suddenly you can scroll through the entire conversation history, seeing the evolution of your project and finding those crucial decision points.

When One Conversation Becomes Many

Here’s where Claude Code really shines: conversation branching. During complex projects, it’s common to be working on feature A when a critical bug B surfaces, or when you want to explore two different implementation approaches.

Rather than losing focus on the main task, I simply duplicate my terminal and run claude --continue in the new window. Now I have two parallel conversations—one continuing with the original task, another exploring the new direction. Each maintains its own context and history, but both start from the same foundational understanding of the project.

This has been really helpful in my short time using it. I can experiment with different solutions, compare approaches side-by-side, or handle urgent fixes without derailing the main conversation thread.

The Power of CLAUDE.md Files

One thing I’ve started doing is creating CLAUDE.md files in project roots. These act as persistent memory for Claude—project conventions, architectural decisions, common commands, and context that should persist across all sessions.

When Claude starts in a directory with a CLAUDE.md file, it automatically incorporates that knowledge. This means even after weeks away from a project, Claude immediately understands the codebase structure, coding standards, and project-specific workflows.

Real-World Impact

Even in just a week, this session management has changed how I approach development tasks. Instead of trying to complete everything in one marathon session, I can work in natural chunks, knowing that context preservation means no work is ever lost.

I’ve found myself more willing to explore experimental approaches, knowing I can always branch the conversation and return to a stable state. The fear of “losing progress” that used to push me toward rushed decisions is mostly gone.

For teams, this creates interesting possibilities too. Being able to resume specific conversation contexts means knowledge transfer becomes much more granular and effective.

Claude Code’s approach to conversation management reflects something deeper about how we actually work—in iterative cycles, with frequent context switches, building understanding over time rather than in linear progression. The tool adapts to human workflow patterns rather than forcing us to adapt to its limitations.