milk.tools: From Teaching Claude to Remember to Taming the Noise
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.
milk-mcp: The External Brain
I built an MCP server that connects Claude Code to Remember The Milk. 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.
It worked. Claude could finally remember things.
The New Problem
But now my RTM account was full of dev project lists. Five lists per project, times however many projects I was working on. When I opened RTM to check my groceries or plan my week, I was wading through walls of TODOs and Backlog items and Decisions for code I wasn't even thinking about.
The data was exactly where I wanted it - in RTM, persisted, accessible. But it was noise. I use RTM for everything, not just coding. I didn't want to see my milk-mcp projects every time I opened the app to add "buy milk" to my shopping list.
milk-pm: Separation of Concerns
So I built a dashboard. milk-pm pulls all the milk-mcp project data from RTM and presents it in one place - a dedicated view for just the dev stuff. TODOs, backlog, bugs, decisions, across all projects.
Now RTM can stay clean for everything else. When I want to see what's happening across my code projects, I open milk-pm. When I want to check my grocery list, I open RTM. Separation of concerns.
milk.tools
I bundled both tools under milk.tools - a home for this little ecosystem of probably-unnecessary-but-definitely-useful developer tools built on Remember The Milk.
Both are open source, MIT licensed. Setup for milk-mcp takes about five minutes if you already have an RTM account.
The tagline wrote itself: "Probably unnecessary. Definitely useful."