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 <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: