How to Save Your Work Between Claude Accounts (Brain Keys)

0:00 Brain Keys Solve the Claude Account Problem
Here’s how to save your work so one Claude account can pick up exactly where another one stopped. The trick is something we call Brain keys, and once you set it up, switching accounts stops costing you anything.

0:13 Why Claude Accounts Share Zero Memory
Here’s the problem. Every Claude account starts every chat completely blank. There is zero memory shared between two accounts. So if you switch accounts, hit a usage limit, or lose your connection in the middle of a task, the next seat knows nothing. Not the decision you made an hour ago, not the step it was on, not the bug it already ruled out.

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0:34 Brain Database vs Chat Memory Compared
The fix is simple: stop storing your state in the conversation. Compare the two. Chat memory is locked to one account, it disappears when the chat drops, and nobody else can read it. The Brain is a single database table called pr_brain. Any account, any seat, can read it. Every write is versioned in a history table, and it survives restarts, limits, and account switches.

0:58 What a Brain Key Actually Is
So what is a Brain key? It’s just a named row. One key name and one value, which can be plain text or JSON. The name is unique, so writing to it again updates it instead of making a duplicate. Each key has a category, like sessions, learnings, or known bugs, and a priority. And a database trigger copies every change into a history table, so nothing is ever silently lost.

1:26 Four Keys That Carry a Full Session
Four keys carry a whole session. The session cursor holds the task, the step it’s on, and what comes next. The session log for today holds the decisions, the corrections, and the reasons why. Active workstreams says which seat owns which job right now, so two accounts never collide. And open items is everything unfinished, in one list. Read those four, and any account is caught up in under a minute.

1:54 What the First Account Does While Working
Here’s what the first account does while it works. One, claim the work by adding your seat to active workstreams. Two, update the session cursor every time the task or the next step changes. Three, journal decisions as they happen, one to three lines in today’s session log, not at the end. Four, back up any driver to a backup key before you edit it. And five, log every shipped change as one row in the changelog.

2:23 Key Naming Prefixes and What They Mean
Naming matters, because the prefix tells the next seat what a key is for. Keys ending in live hold the current contract for a system. Learning keys record something that proved an old rule wrong. Known bug keys are bugs not fixed yet. Backup keys are copies made before an edit. And SR_SCRIPT keys are runnable driver scripts, like the boot script itself. Now the second account picks it up.

2:51 How the Second Account Picks Up the Work
First, run the boot protocol, which rebuilds the system snapshot. Then read the session cursor and active workstreams to see what the last seat was doing and who owns what. Read the last two session logs, so you get the decisions and corrections, not just the status. Check the last twenty changelog rows to see what actually shipped. Then claim your seat and carry on from the cursor’s next step. Because the cursor is always current, recovery is one line. You glitched, read the cursor and continue. That’s all a new account needs to hear.

3:25 Rules That Keep Brain Keys Reliable
A few rules keep this reliable. Save on outcome: write when something is fixed or decided, not later. Live state lives in the database, so never trust a document or your memory for what’s running right now. Don’t race a live run; if another seat owns it, coordinate through the Brain. And keep secrets out of the chat. Reference the key name, not the credential itself. So work once, and resume anywhere. Put the state in the Brain, and every Claude account becomes the same operator. Start every session the same way: boot, read the cursor, read the logs, claim your seat, and save as you go.