Stickies (Claude Code plugin)

Persistent sticky notes for Claude Code. You pin a note — a decision, a blocker, a todo — and it survives session resets, /clear, and closing the terminal. Next time you open Claude in that project, the notes that still matter are handed back to it automatically.

Stickies is not a memory system, and it doesn't try to be one. It won't watch your session and decide what to remember. It's the opposite: a handful of notes you (or Claude, on request) write down on purpose, that expire on their own, and that you can read, prune, and trust. No vectors, no LLM summarization, no cloud. If you want an AI that auto-remembers everything, use Claude Code's built-in memory — it's on by default. Stickies is for when you want the twenty notes that actually matter, and you want them to expire.

Quick start (60 seconds)

You need Node ≥ 22.5 (node -v to check — it's for the built-in SQLite).

claude plugin marketplace add dumbspacecookie/stickies
claude plugin install stickies@stickies --scope user

Restart Claude Code. That's it — install once, it works in every project. Now try it:

• Ask Claude to remember something: "pin a P1 todo: fix the auth leak before release." Claude writes it down; it'll be waiting for you next session.

• See your notes: type /stickies in Claude Code. Prefer a shell? npm i -g stickies-mcp gives you a stickies command — then stickies list.

• Open the board in a browser: /stickies dashboard, then stickies dashboard --link for an authorized URL (the board serves your notes, so it only answers a browser you've let in).

Nothing leaves your machine. Everything is a local SQLite file on your disk until you turn on optional git sync.

Related MCP server: Vibe Board VE

Where it works

Notes belong to the project, not the app you're in — one local database, scoped by project. What changes between surfaces is how much happens automatically.

Two things here you won't find elsewhere

• Zero-turn capture. Claude parks a note by writing one line in a reply it was already writing — !!sticky todo P1 :: fix the auth leak — and a Stop hook persists it. No extra tool call, no extra turn, no tokens spent on a round-trip. (See Auto-capture.)

• Importance-graded injection. The session-start digest degrades by importance, not by position: P1 in full, P2 truncated, P3 a bare count. It never just chops the list at N lines.

Flow Board

If your project plans work in a .planning/ROADMAP.md (the GSD planning convention), Stickies also gives you a live Kanban board derived straight from that roadmap — To-Do / Doing / Done — with your stickies cross-linked onto the phases they're about. It's a projection of your plan, derived on the fly, so it can never drift out of sync with it.

Four places to see the same board, pick whichever fits where you are:

stickies board                     # write BOARD.md in the project root (commit it → view on GitHub)
stickies board --out docs/BOARD.md # write it somewhere else
stickies board --discord           # post the board to your Discord webhook instead

Each phase shows its progress (3/4), its wave, whether it shipped (✓ shipped 4/4) and whether it's blocked (⛔). In a cloud/mobile session with no .planning/, a committed .flow/ snapshot keeps the board self-sufficient — same repo-mode idea as the notes.

Everyday commands

In Claude Code (the /stickies slash command):

In any shell (the CLI — same engine). Install it with npm i -g stickies-mcp to get the stickies command on your PATH, then:

stickies list                          # active notes for this dir + globals
stickies list --all                    # every project + globals
stickies add "ship the release" -c todo -i P1     # add a P1 todo to this project
stickies add "pay invoice" -c todo --due 2d       # a deadline (30m/2h/1d/1w/tomorrow/YYYY-MM-DD)
stickies add "call the bank" -c todo -p global    # a global todo — shows up everywhere
stickies dismiss <id> -r "done"        # clear it
stickies dashboard --open              # local web board, open the browser
stickies board                         # write a GitHub-viewable BOARD.md
stickies status                        # the one-line statusline summary
stickies sync                          # pull → merge → commit (push needs STICKIES_SYNC_PUSH=1)
stickies notify                        # push the open list to Discord
stickies init-repo                     # make notes work in cloud/mobile (repo-mode)

Auto-capture

The lowest-friction way in: Claude captures a durable fact by writing one line in its reply, and a Stop hook persists it — no tool call, no extra turn.

!!sticky <category> [P1|P2|P3] [global] [#tag ...] :: <content>
!!sticky decision P1 #storage :: storage is node:sqlite, no native deps
!!sticky todo P1 global :: cut the npm release

category is required; importance defaults to P2; notes are deduped. global and #tags are optional and may appear in any order. Without global, a note is scoped to the current project; with it, the note surfaces in every project.

The hook scans the whole completed turn, so a directive written before Claude runs more tools still gets saved. Directives inside subagent replies are ignored. Secrets are scrubbed on write.

Statusline

Point your Claude Code statusline at Stickies to get an always-on summary. It's opt-in — add this to your settings.json:

{ "statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "stickies status" } }

(that uses the stickies command from npm i -g stickies-mcp)

By default it's compact — a count plus an urgency flag, e.g. 🟨 2!·19 (2 urgent of 19). It deliberately does not print note text (so nothing sensitive lands in your prompt); set STICKIES_STATUSLINE_VERBOSE=1 if you want the top note's text too.

Light / dark. A statusline can't repaint your terminal's background — it can only colour its own text — so the theme's job is to stay legible on whatever background you already have. The dark palette (default) uses the terminal's own bright colours; the light palette swaps in darker truecolour values that survive a white background (tuned to clear WCAG AA text contrast). Pick it with STICKIES_THEME=light (or dark) in your environment, or per-invocation with stickies status --light / --theme dark. On macOS/Linux terminals that publish $COLORFGBG it also autodetects; Windows Terminal / PowerShell don't set that variable, so on Windows set STICKIES_THEME explicitly if you run a light terminal. The dashboard (/, /board, /graph) is a real web page, so it gets a full ☾/☀ toggle that flips the whole background — that's a page it owns, unlike the statusline.

Clickable link. In a terminal that supports OSC-8 hyperlinks (Windows Terminal, iTerm2, WezTerm, Kitty, Ghostty) the segment becomes a Ctrl+click link that opens the dashboard. Two things it needs:

• A dashboard must actually be running — stickies dashboard --detach. The segment is a link only while one is; with none running you still get the counts, just not underlined and not clickable. That is deliberate: a link to a closed port looks alive, fails only when you click it, and blames your browser rather than us. Autostart is off unless you ask for it, so no link is the default state on a fresh install. If the segment is not clickable and you expected it to be, stickies doctor says which of these two it is.

• On Windows Terminal, Claude Code doesn't auto-detect hyperlink support, so set FORCE_HYPERLINK=1 in your environment before launching Claude Code (e.g. setx FORCE_HYPERLINK 1, then restart). Without it the segment renders but isn't clickable.

The link auto-skips under tmux (which mangles OSC-8), disables with --no-link, and its port follows STICKIES_DASHBOARD_PORT.

Dashboard

stickies dashboard                 # http://127.0.0.1:7317/
stickies dashboard --open          # and open the browser
stickies dashboard --detach        # run in the background
stickies dashboard --link          # print an authorized URL for a browser
stickies dashboard --stop          # stop the running one

Loopback only (never leaves 127.0.0.1). Routes: / the notes board, /board the Flow Board Kanban, /graph the plan dependency DAG. One dashboard covers every project you take notes in — the header switcher moves between them, so you don't run one per folder.

It only starts when you ask. Installing Stickies does not put a server on your machine. If you'd rather each Claude session bring one up automatically, set STICKIES_DASHBOARD_AUTOSTART=1 (skipped in CI and remote sessions regardless).

"Not authorized"? That's expected, not a bug. The dashboard serves your notes and planning documents, so it answers only a browser you've authorized:

stickies dashboard --link          # → paste into your browser

…or Ctrl+click the Stickies segment in your statusline, which carries one. Opening the link sets a cookie; that's what lasts. Links themselves expire after a few minutes, so an old one from your scrollback will be refused — get a fresh one. Prefer it open? STICKIES_DASHBOARD_AUTH=0.

Editing the plan from the board is off by default. With STICKIES_BOARD_WRITEBACK=1, dragging a card rewrites that phase's **Status:** line in .planning/ROADMAP.md, keeping a pre-edit copy in .flow/roadmap-backups/. A move that contradicts the phase's plan checkboxes is refused rather than written.

Something not behaving? stickies doctor reports the whole setup in one shot — what's running, on which port, whether the installed plugin copy is stale — with your home directory abbreviated to ~ so the output is safe to paste.

Provenance

Every note records where it was written — 💻 terminal, 🖥️ desktop, or 📱 mobile — so on the dashboard you can tell the note you jotted from your phone from the one Claude captured at your desk. It's a best-effort stamp each entry point knows about itself; no configuration needed.

Sync (git-backed, opt-in)

Sync through a git repo you own — no third-party service, no new account. This is the only feature that ever touches the network, and only once you point it at a remote.

export STICKIES_SYNC_REPO=/path/to/your/stickies-data   # a git clone you control
stickies sync           # pull → merge (last-writer-wins) → export → commit (push: STICKIES_SYNC_PUSH=1)

# or offline, through any file channel:
stickies export -f notes.json
stickies import -f notes.json

Each note carries a machine-independent key derived from the project's git remote (SSH and HTTPS collapse to the same key), so a project's notes follow you between machines even when the checkout lives at a different path on each. Merge is whole-record last-writer-wins by updated_at — conflict-free and order-independent.

Auto-sync (also opt-in): set STICKIES_AUTO_SYNC=1 alongside STICKIES_SYNC_REPO and Stickies pulls on session start and commits when a turn captures a note. Unset, nothing syncs on its own.

Pushing is a third opt-in. Capturing a note commits to your sync repo and stops there — STICKIES_SYNC_PUSH=1 is what makes it git push as well. Without it your notes are versioned locally and never leave the machine, so a second machine will never see them. The push runs bare (no remote, no refspec) so your own git config decides where it goes; deriving that ourselves went wrong three separate ways, once writing a stray branch onto a shared main.

Repo-mode (cloud / mobile)

The plugin lives in ~/.claude, so it doesn't exist in a cloud session (the iPhone app / claude.ai/code run in an ephemeral VM that only sees the repo they cloned). Repo-mode makes Stickies work there — no plugin, nothing to install:

stickies init-repo         # run inside the repo you want notes in

That commits a self-contained, zero-dependency engine and wires it up:

• .stickies/notes.json — the store, plus a human-readable .stickies/NOTES.md mirror

• .claude/settings.json — a SessionStart hook (the digest) and a Stop hook (!!sticky capture)

• CLAUDE.md — teaches Claude the !!sticky convention

• .github/workflows/stickies-sync.yml — converges notes from every session branch into main

Cloud sessions write to their own branch; the bundled Action merges each note into main (union + dismiss-wins + dedupe) — one converged board per repo, hands-off. Same !!sticky grammar and same redaction as the local plugin.

Two things worth knowing before you run it: your notes live in that repo, so they are as public as it is; and if a step can't be done safely — an unparseable .claude/settings.json, most often an unresolved merge conflict — that file is left alone and the command warns and exits non-zero rather than replacing it.

The sticky model

Fields: id, content (≤ 500 chars), category, importance (P1/P2/P3), project_path (absolute, or null for global), tags[], origin, timestamps, expires_at, source (auto/manual), status (active/stale/dismissed).

Default TTLs: decision 30d · blocker 7d · preference 90d · context 14d · todo never expires (a task is done when you dismiss it, not when a timer runs out). That last one is what makes todo + global a real cross-project task list — an unfinished task can't silently vanish.

Storage: one SQLite file for all projects, scoped per-project — $STICKIES_DB if set, else ~/.stickies/stickies.db. It uses Node's built-in SQLite (node:sqlite, hence Node ≥ 22.5), so the plugin has zero compiled dependencies and survives Claude Code's plugin-cache copy on any machine.

Session-start digest: P1 in full, P2 to ~100 chars, P3 a count. It's handed to Claude through the SessionStart hook's additionalContext — it reaches the model without writing to any file.

Claude Desktop (MCP only)

Claude Desktop supports the MCP tools (stickies_write / stickies_read / stickies_dismiss) but not hooks or the slash command, so there's no auto-capture or digest there — add it and pass the project path explicitly. In claude_desktop_config.json (%APPDATA%\Claude\ on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/ on macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "stickies": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["--disable-warning=ExperimentalWarning", "/abs/path/to/stickies/src/server.js"]
    }
  }
}

Both clients read the same ~/.stickies/stickies.db, so a note written in one shows up in the other with no sync step.

Components (reference)

Install & develop

# use it:
claude plugin marketplace add dumbspacecookie/stickies
claude plugin install stickies@stickies --scope user     # restart Claude Code after

# work on it:
git clone https://github.com/dumbspacecookie/stickies
cd stickies
npm test        # 27 suites, 558 assertions, no network

Install once at user scope and it's in every project; per-project scoping is by project_path on each note, not a per-project install.

How Stickies compares

Persistent-notes-for-Claude-Code is a crowded space. Honestly:

• Claude Code's built-in memory — on by default, the model decides what to save, no expiry, no importance tiers, no cross-project globals, per-repo only. Stickies is the deterministic, human-authored, expiring alternative for people who turned that off.

• Knowledge-graph / vector memory servers (mem0, OpenMemory, server-memory, basic-memory) — fuzzy retrieval over everything you've said. Different job. Stickies stores a small typed set, not an embedding index.

• Hook-based memory plugins — several exist, some excellent. Stickies' narrow bets are the ones above: zero-turn !!sticky capture, importance-graded injection, a global tier that surfaces across projects, and a Flow Board derived from your plan.

If you want auto-recall of your whole history, use one of those. Stickies is for a short, trustworthy, self-pruning list — and a board you can glance at from your phone.

MIT · built by dumbspacecookie