milk-mcp: Teaching Claude to Remember
I use Remember The Milk obsessively. Have for years. It's the one productivity tool that never got replaced - not by Notion, not by Linear, not by whatever the hot new thing is this month. It's just a list app that does its job and stays out of the way.
When I started using Claude Code seriously, I kept running into the same wall: every new session, Claude had no idea what we'd been working on. I'd have to re-explain the project, re-establish context, re-litigate decisions we'd already made. It felt like working with someone who had anterograde amnesia. Smart, helpful, completely unable to form new long-term memories.
The obvious solution was some kind of external memory store. And I already had one I trusted.
What It Does
milk-mcp is a TypeScript MCP server that connects Claude Code to your RTM account and uses it as a persistent memory layer. For each project, it creates five lists:
- TODO - what's active right now
- Backlog - deferred work
- Bugs - logged with reproduction steps
- Decisions - architectural choices, with the reasoning that led to them
- Context - the handoff note from last session
Starting a session is just: "Let's work on [project]." Claude calls rtm_session_start, reads your open TODOs and the latest context note, and picks up where you left off. Ending a session is just: "Let's wrap up." Claude writes a handoff summary, saves it to RTM, and next-you will actually know what happened.
The Decisions list is the part I use most. I can't count the number of times a past-me made an architectural call that present-me thought was wrong, only to dig into it and find there was a very good reason. Now Claude logs those decisions with rationale, and neither of us has to relitigate them.
Why RTM
Partly because I already had the account. But also because the RTM API is genuinely solid, the free tier is more than enough, and there's something satisfying about a 20-year-old task manager becoming the external brain for a state-of-the-art AI coding assistant. The old and the new. The buddy list and the language model.
Also, the name was right there. You can't not call it milk-mcp.
Get It
Open source, MIT licensed, setup takes about five minutes.