Merriweather.
Help topics
  1. Getting Started
  2. The Menu Bar
  3. Today and the Ledger
  4. Meetings
  5. Follow Through
  6. Knowledge
  7. Memory and Ask
  8. Assistants
  9. Engagements and Accounts
  10. Privacy
  11. Troubleshooting
Help · 08

Assistants

How to have Claude Code or another assistant write what it learns into a journal that Merriweather keeps.

Assistants such as Claude Code do real work: they read code, read wikis, and make changes. Most of what they learn is gone when the session ends. Merriweather gives them a place to write it down, and keeps it.

The Work Journal

The Work Journal is a folder of Markdown files, one per entry, in your account:

~/Library/Application Support/Merriweather/Journal/

An entry has a short block at the top saying what kind it is, who wrote it, and when. An Article is something learned or read. An Activity is something done. A Link points at a page worth keeping.

Merriweather reads the folder when it starts, when the folder changes, and when you switch engagement. It never writes to the journal. Each entry becomes a document in the active engagement, under Documents, marked as written by the assistant. If a file changes, Merriweather reads it as a new version. If an entry names a project in its about, it is tagged to that project.

Set up Claude Code

Open Settings and find Assistants. Choose Claude Code, then Install the skill. This puts the Merriweather skill in ~/.claude/skills/merriweather. Claude Code picks it up in its next session. When a later version of Merriweather carries a newer skill, the button reads Update the skill.

You can also copy the instructions for CLAUDE.md. For Codex and other agents there are instructions for AGENTS.md. ChatGPT cannot write files here. It gives you the entry to save, and you put it in the journal folder as a .md file.

Ask for a survey

In Settings, under Assistants, enter the repository or folder as the assistant will see it. Two buttons copy a ready prompt:

  • How it works: an overview of its systems
  • What is good and what could improve, and why

Paste the prompt into Claude Code. It reads the repository and writes one Article to the journal. The first prompt says:

Review the repository at (your path) and give an overview of its systems and how they work. Write it to my work journal as an Article.

To keep a wiki or a set of pages, ask in plain words, for example: "Read the wiki at this address and write down what matters in my work journal." The skill has guidance for this. The assistant writes an Article marked as a reading, and a Link for each page that matters.

The assistant should write only about what it read, and should say how sure it is.

Seeing what was read

The Assistants section shows the journal's path with an Open button, the number of entries read, and how many could not be read. The arrow beside the count reads the journal again.

Not available yet

  • There is no MCP server. An assistant cannot query Merriweather.
  • There is no URL scheme. Nothing outside the app can open a Merriweather window.
  • Activity entries are kept as documents. They do not add time to the Ledger.
  • The journal is one folder for the whole account. It is not kept inside a project's repository.

Assistants write to the journal. Merriweather reads it. That is the whole connection for now.