The problem
Notes don’t get taken because taking notes requires stopping work to take notes.
The insight that has value — the moment a blocker resolved, the design decision that changed the direction, the thing you figured out that you’ll need to remember — happens in the middle of doing something. By the time you have time to write it down, the texture is gone.
What it is
Captain’s Log is a Claude skill: a passive session note-taker that runs alongside your work and records what actually mattered.
Each day produces a single Markdown file with two sections:
- Summary — manager-readable. Started with / ended with, signal bullets, key decisions. Distilled at the end of the day.
- Raw Log — timestamped entries as captured. Never edited. Permanent record.
What it captures automatically: git commits and pushes (the why, not the diff — that’s already in git), context file creation, branch switches.
What you trigger explicitly: log this when something clicks, tidy up at the end of the day.
The design
One plain Markdown file per day. Stored wherever you choose — one central location or inside each repo. No app, no database, no sync engine. Readable and committable with any tooling.
The skill detects your repo, branch, and any ticket references from branch names on session start. In corporate environments it picks up KR and sprint context automatically.
Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dhk/captains-log-repo/main/install.sh | bash
Includes two complete demo log sets: the creation of Git in April 2005, and the Seven Days of Genesis as an engineering build — both showing what finished logs look like across completely different registers.