The practice of decomposing a large project into a sequence of specialised Claude Code sessions — discovery, planning, execution — where each session’s output document becomes the next session’s input, preserving continuity without bloating any single context.
Key points
- Discovery session: reads PDFs, codebases, raw sources → produces a concise summary document [011]
- Planning session: ingests the summary → produces a structured plan file [011]
- Execution session: ingests the plan → implements — no conversation history from prior sessions needed [011]
- Functions like an assembly line: each session has one specialised responsibility and a clean context [011]
- Complementary to the Session Handoff skill, which packages up mid-session state for a clean handover [011]
- Nate recommends this pattern especially for beginners building context discipline before using the full 1M token window [011]
- Addresses the root cause of Context Rot: by starting fresh, there is no history to re-read and no attention dilution [011]
Related entities
- Claude Code — the runtime
Related concepts
- Context Rot — the problem session chaining prevents
- Context Management — the broader discipline
- Decomposition Pattern — related pattern; session chaining is decomposition applied to the temporal dimension
Source references
- [011] Nate Herk — Claude Code power features cluster (2026-04-20 to 2026-04-27)