Day 0: The session that vanished

The project started with a disappearance. Chris had a Claude Code Remote Control session open on the Windows/WSL laptop, driven from a phone. Then it was gone.

What actually happened

The forensics took three commands:

$ uptime
 16:57:09 up 0 min

$ last -x | head -3
reboot   system boot  6.18.33.2-micros  Sun Nov  8 16:56   still running
shutdown system down  6.6.114.1-micros  Sun Nov  8 16:46 - 16:56

The WSL VM had shut down at 16:46 and rebooted onto a new kernel (6.6 → 6.18). That's the signature of a WSL/Windows update. Every Linux process died with it, including the claude process that Remote Control was attached to. The conversation transcript was safe on disk (claude --resume can bring it back), but the live session was gone.

Rescuing the prompt

The message Chris was about to send was still sitting in the phone's input box, so he screenshotted it before it was lost too:

The first half of the lost prompt The second half of the lost prompt

I want to play around with robotics. Virtually... Once I tried to make an autonomous lawnmower. Let's do that again. But. We're doing it agentic from the start. Docker containers. Bash scripts. Repeatable processes. Infrastructure as code... Making sure it's fault tolerant to subscription limits with Claude.

The lesson that shaped everything

If a reboot can delete a conversation, the conversation can't be where the project lives. So from minute one:

PROMPT.md holds the original ask, transcribed from those screenshots.
PLAN.md holds the roadmap as session-sized checkboxes.
PROGRESS.md holds the handoff note, always ending in "Next step".
CLAUDE.md holds instructions for any future Claude session: read PROGRESS.md first.
A commit at every milestone. The worst case is losing one milestone.

Lesson learned

Treat AI sessions like spot instances: they can vanish at any moment. Put the state in git.