Refine Claude's work through memory and instructions

How Claude learns, and how to give feedback

When you correct Claude or tell it how your team works, you usually want that to apply next time too, not only in the thread you are in. Claude Tag has two places for things that should last:

• Memory: notes Claude writes down about the channel and your work. You can also add to them by telling Claude in a message.
• Channel instructions: rules a person types into the channel's settings page. Claude follows them in every thread.

If a note and an instruction disagree, Claude follows the instruction.

For a deeper dive on what Claude learns, see what Claude remembers.

Memory

Memory is Claude's notes about your channel. When you tell Claude something that should apply next time too, like a correction, a preference, or who owns what, it saves a note. It also saves notes on its own as it works. In later threads, Claude reads these notes before it answers. Anyone in the channel can ask Claude to add, change, or delete a note. Each note is scoped either to one channel or to the whole workspace:

• To add a note: @Claude remember for this channel: …
• Channel notes apply in that channel only. Claude keeps a separate set of notes for each channel. In your DM, Claude also keeps notes, and those are scoped to you and only you can access them.
• Workspace notes apply in every channel. Claude saves one only from a public channel, and only for things everyone should know, like a company-wide naming rule. See what Claude remembers.

How to keep memory useful over time

Claude keeps adding notes as it works, so notes can go out of date as your organization changes. At any time, you can ask Claude to show, correct, or update them:

• To see what it has picked up: @Claude what do you remember about this channel?
• If something is wrong, correct it: @Claude remember for this channel: [corrected version]
• If something is stale, remove it: @Claude that’s outdated, forget the entry about [topic].

Owners of your Claude organization can also view, edit, and delete a channel's notes and the workspace notes in Claude Tag's admin settings on claude.ai.

Channel instructions

Channel instructions are rules someone on your team types into the channel's settings page, for example: "This channel handles billing questions. Keep replies short. Never contact customers directly." Claude reads them at the start of every thread. They are guidance Claude follows closely, not a hard lock: for anything that must never happen, use a setting or an access control rather than a sentence.

• Good uses: the channel's purpose, what to reply to without being tagged, tone and length, which sources to answer from, where to file things.
• Where to edit them: click Configure under any Claude reply. Usually anyone in the channel with a Claude account at your organization can edit them; an admin can lock the page. If it is locked, ask whoever manages Claude Tag for your channel.
• Also on that page: the Respond automatically setting, which controls whether Claude replies without being tagged (lesson 7), and the list of connected tools, which only admins and channel managers can change.
• Changes apply to new threads, so test in a fresh one.
• For more: see how to set channel instructions.

You will see the whole page, with what sits beside the instructions, in lesson 10.

Example channel instructions for a bug triaging channel:

This channel triages customer bug reports for the billing service.
When a new message contains an error ID, start a thread:
- look the error up in the monitoring tool
- link the dashboard
- propose an owner
Otherwise stay quiet unless tagged.
Keep replies under six lines; link to logs rather than pasting them.
File confirmed bugs in the tracker with the label from-chat.
Investigation is read-only; never touch production.

Memory can hold a rule too; it just holds it more loosely than instructions do. Some feedback, like formatting and voice rules, can live in either place. To try a rule out quickly, tell Claude "keep replies under six lines" in the channel: it saves it to memory and follows it.

To recap

Memory holds what Claude learns as it goes and the rules you are trying out. Channel instructions hold the rules that have proven themselves and must apply in every thread. When a rule you tried in memory has settled, move it to the channel's instructions. If you don't have edit access to the instructions, ask whoever manages Claude Tag for the channel to promote it.

Improving Claude's results

Now that you know how memory and instructions work, when Claude's results are not what you expected you can usually spot the cause, and each cause has a fix:

Practice

Try it

Before you move on

Key takeaway: say it in the channel; promote what must hold every time into instructions.

After practicing: You will have saved one correction to the channel's notes and seen it show up in Claude's next answer, and you will know whether you can edit this channel's instructions.