dev-diary

A developer journal that writes itself — and stays scannable.

At the end of a day, run the loop. It discovers what you actually did from your local Claude Code sessions, git commits, and prompt history; interviews you about what mattered and why; and records a tight, dated entry you can scan in seconds and still trust months later.

/dev-diary
   discover  →  today's prompts, sessions, and commits (deterministic digest)
   research  →  drill into the commits/sessions that look significant
   interview →  confirm what mattered, capture the reasoning behind it
   write     →  entries/<YYYY>/<date>.md  +  CHANGELOG.md   (in the journal repo)

Commands

• /dev-diary [date] — write today's entry (or backfill a past YYYY-MM-DD).
• /dev-diary-review [date] — revise an entry that already exists: correct a mistake, enrich a thin/backfilled day with the reasoning only you remember, or tighten the writing. Clears the backfilled: true marker once a day is really reviewed.

Install

/plugin marketplace add JRichlen/agent-plugins
/plugin install dev-diary@jrichlen

The tool/journal split

This plugin is only the tool. The journal is a separate private repo at ~/projects/dev-diary — that's where entries and the changelog live. The plugin is shareable; the diary is not, so they're kept apart. Both skills reference the journal by that absolute path.

If your journal lives elsewhere, point the skills at it by editing the journal-root path in skills/dev-diary/SKILL.md and skills/dev-diary-review/SKILL.md.

Layout

dev-diary/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json
├── commands/
│   ├── dev-diary.md            ← /dev-diary
│   └── dev-diary-review.md     ← /dev-diary-review
└── skills/
    ├── dev-diary/
    │   ├── SKILL.md                    ← the write loop
    │   ├── scripts/discover-today.sh   ← deterministic "what happened" digest
    │   ├── templates/entry.md          ← the entry shape
    │   └── references/format-guide.md  ← the house style
    └── dev-diary-review/
        └── SKILL.md                    ← the edit loop

Principles

• Significance over completeness — the entry is the judged version of a day.
• Capture the why — decisions without reasoning rot.
• Never commit a secret — entries redact pasted tokens/keys by rule.
• Backfilled ≠ reviewed — reconstructed days say so until you vet them.