If you’ve followed my journey building BurntAI.com, you know I’ve been leaning heavily on Anthropic Claude for development. Why? Simple — it spits out functional code with less prompting. I can drop in a request, and it gives me something that’s 80–90% ready to paste into my project. That’s invaluable when you’re cranking out features for an AlmaLinux 10 server at warp speed.

But there’s always been one giant frustration: Claude’s memory is like a goldfish. Ask it about something we discussed yesterday, and it’ll blink back at you like, “Who are you again?”

Meanwhile, other chats — even ones I barely use — can “remember” details. Claude? Not so much. At least… until now.

August 11, 2025 — The Big Announcement

Claude 4.1 rolled out a new feature: Search and reference chats. Think of it as memory’s slightly less impressive cousin. It’s not true recall, but it lets Claude search past chats and pull relevant ones into the conversation.

Of course, it’s MAX plan only — but lucky for me, with everything I’m building on BurntAI.com, I qualified.

To turn it on:

Go to claude.ai.

Click your profile picture.

Go to Settings.

Find Search and reference chats and flip the slider to ON.

Now Claude can pretend it remembers me.

But… Not So Fast

The key word here is search. It’s not true “memory” — Claude doesn’t know me, it just looks through our old conversations for matching topics. And like any search engine, it sometimes gets things hilariously wrong.

Case in point: I’ve only ever built BurntAI.com on AlmaLinux 10. I’ve told Claude this in countless chats. Yet the other day, while migrating a dev feature to production, it confidently announced:

“Since you’re running Debian/Ubuntu in production…”

Uh… what?

Apparently, even with the power to reference past chats, Claude can still invent alternate realities. It’s like having an assistant who takes great notes but sometimes flips to the wrong page in the notebook.

My Takeaway

This is progress. Being able to search old chats saves me from endless copy-paste archaeology. But it’s still not the true memory I’m hoping AI assistants will have in the future — where they can accurately track long-term projects without hallucinating my OS.

For now, I’ll keep using Claude as my main dev partner for BurntAI.com, goldfish brain and all. Because even if it sometimes confuses AlmaLinux for Debian, it still writes some pretty awesome code.

-Jeff