A method, packaged as a Claude skill, for moving the full context of a long AI chat into a fresh one. When a conversation gets too long, you say "make the pill" and the chat distills everything that matters into one dense markdown file: current state, decisions and why they were made, every non-obvious problem solved with its root cause, the environment's sharp edges, your standing instructions, and what was in flight. You upload that file at the start of the next chat and continue where you left off.
Built-in memory and chat search are useful but they are lossy, implicit, and locked to one account and product. A pill is the opposite on every axis: it is explicit (you can read exactly what carries over), editable, versionable in git, and portable across accounts, projects, tools, and even across different AI models. It is generated by the model that still holds the full context, at the moment it matters, instead of being reconstructed later from fragments.
A pill carries text only. Binaries, working trees, and uploads do not cross the chat boundary, which is why the pill's first section always names exactly what you must re-upload. A pill is a snapshot and goes stale the moment work continues, so regenerate at each milestone, and regenerate from the live chat rather than from the previous pill, because compression errors compound. Anything the generating model chose not to write down is lost; the skill's resume test exists to catch that before delivery.
If your Claude plan supports skills: upload handoff-pill.skill (or this
folder) as a skill. From then on, "make the pill" in any chat produces one,
and uploading a *_PILL.md at the start of a chat triggers the ingestion
protocol automatically.
If it does not: paste the contents of SKILL.md and
references/pill-template.md into the chat and say "make the pill
following these instructions". Same method, manual trigger.
- Work normally. When the chat gets long, or you hit a milestone, say: "make the pill".
- Download
<PROJECT>_HANDOFF_PILL.md. - Start a new chat. Upload the pill (plus any artifacts it names as required). The new chat confirms the loaded state back to you in a few lines, then you continue.
This came out of building Infi OS, a bare metal AI native operating system
developed across many long Claude sessions. Each session ended by
generating a pill; each new session began by ingesting one, alongside the
delivered build tarball. The pill for that project carried a 15-entry
debugging casebook, the exact build and test harness rules learned the hard
way, and the owner's standing directives, and it proved more current than
the shipped PDF reference in places where the reference had gone stale.
The template in references/pill-template.md is that pill's structure,
generalized.