Stickies

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.

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 -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 refuse