milk.tools - Developer Tools for Remember The Milk

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. So when I needed persistent memory for AI coding sessions and a better way to visualize my projects, RTM was the obvious foundation.

milk.tools is a suite of developer tools that extend Remember The Milk for AI-assisted development and project management. Currently two tools, both open source.

milk-mcp

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that connects Claude Code to your Remember The Milk account. It gives Claude persistent memory across coding sessions.

Claude Code sessions are temporary. Close the window, and everything you discussed - the decisions you made, the tasks you identified, the context you built up - vanishes. Next session, you start from scratch. milk-mcp fixes that.

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

Automatic Sessions

Add a few lines to your ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and Claude will automatically load context when you start working and save a handoff summary when you wrap up. It uses the current folder name as the project name, so there's nothing to remember.

Session start - Claude calls rtm_session_start, reads your open TODOs and the latest context note, and picks up where you left off
Session end - Say "wrap up" or "done for now" and Claude writes a handoff summary with what was accomplished, what's in progress, and suggested next steps

Available Tools

The MCP server exposes 16 tools to Claude, organized around key workflows:

Project Management - rtm_list_projects, rtm_setup_project
Session Lifecycle - rtm_session_start, rtm_session_end, rtm_get_context
Task Management - rtm_add_task, rtm_add_backlog, rtm_add_bug, rtm_log_decision, rtm_complete_task, rtm_update_task, rtm_promote_to_todo
Queries - rtm_get_todos, rtm_get_backlog, rtm_get_bugs, rtm_get_decisions

Setup

You'll need a Remember The Milk account (free tier works fine) and API credentials. No cloning required - everything runs via npx.

# Authenticate with RTM
npx milk-mcp auth

# Add the MCP server to Claude Code
claude mcp add milk-mcp -- npx milk-mcp@latest

# Restart Claude Code

Using @latest ensures you always get new features automatically. Current version: v0.2.4 on npm.

milk-pm

A web dashboard for visualizing your RTM data as a project management view. See all your projects at a glance with open task counts and bug badges, then drill into any project to see TODO, Backlog, Bugs, Decisions, and Context.

When you're using milk-mcp across multiple projects, you end up with a lot of lists in RTM. milk-pm consolidates them into a single dashboard so you can see what's active without wading through RTM's interface (and without cluttering your regular RTM usage).

Dashboard view - All projects at a glance with open task counts and bug badges
Project drill-down - Click into any project to see all five lists
Stats bar - Total open items and bugs across all projects
Configurable - Works out of the box with milk-mcp's naming convention, or bring your own via projects.json
Shared credentials - Already using milk-mcp? Copy your credentials from ~/.config/milk-mcp/config

Currently read-only. Task editing from the dashboard is on the roadmap.

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.

Also, the name was right there. You can't not call it milk.

Get Started

Both tools are open source, MIT licensed. Visit milk.tools for documentation, or check out the repos:

npx milk-mcp