Where your work lives — the plan, in plain English

Why your stuff needs a new home, and what the new home looks like.

Why we're moving at all

The forcing event

Your entire 1 GB working tree lives inside ~/Documents/, which is iCloud-synced. iCloud decides on its own when to evict files to "save space." On 2026-04-28 it evicted Dev 0 mid-session — files vanished, work stopped. This will keep happening until we move out.

The decisions, one by one

A. Where does it live?

Lean ~/projects/lovebuilt/

Your dev VPS already uses ~/projects/. Matching the path on both machines means there's no mental translation when you're switching between Mac and SSH. ~/code/ would also be fine; ~/dev/ is ambiguous (could mean "the dev VPS").

Trade-off: "lovebuilt" baked into the path means a future personal-vs-business split is cleaner if added later as a sibling (~/projects/personal/) instead of a re-arrangement.

B. One big folder or many small ones?

Option 1

Mega-monorepo — keep N8N-BUILDER as-is, just move it.

✓ Zero disruption. ✗ Every chat loads the full CLAUDE.md. ✗ MCPs can't differ per sub-project.

Option 2

17 separate folders — every project gets its own.

✓ Tight MCP scope. ✗ Shared rules and skills get duplicated or symlinked everywhere.

Lean — Option 3 (hybrid)

Keep ~/projects/lovebuilt/ as a monorepo for the spine (handoffs, memory, _dev0, _resources). Inside it, top-level project folders that can be opened standalone, each with their own CLAUDE.md and .mcp.json.

~/projects/lovebuilt/ ├── CLAUDE.md # the spine ├── memory/ # shared knowledge ├── handoffs/ # shared (hundreds of cross-refs) ├── _dev0/ # Dev 0 owns this ├── _resources/ # shared patterns │ ├── n8n/ # open standalone in iTerm │ ├── CLAUDE.md ↳ n8n-mcp, flowengine only │ └── .mcp.json ├── kdp/ # standalone ├── lever/ # standalone ├── dev-environment/ # standalone ├── praul/ # standalone ├── wiki/ # Karpathy wiki home (see E) └── _basecamp/ # router (see G)

C. Should we rename your Mac user from `coach`?

Lean — defer

There are 2,286 hard-coded /Users/coach references inside ~/.claude/ alone, plus keychain, login items, and FileVault recovery to handle. That's its own multi-day project — don't pile it on top of the iCloud rescue.

D. How do Mac and VPS stay in sync?

Option	Pros	Cons
GitHub private repo	History, blame, mobile review UI	Commit cadence; secrets are scary
Self-hosted Gitea	Fully private	One more service to babysit
rsync cron	Dead simple	No history, no review
Syncthing	Symmetric, NAT-friendly	Conflict files multiply

Lean — two tiers

Slow tier: GitHub private repo for the canonical state. Commit at end of session. .env stays gitignored, secret-scan runs as a pre-commit hook.

Fast tier: keep your existing Mac→VPS lsyncd for the live brainstorm files so VPS bots see updates instantly without waiting for a commit.

Two-tier sync: slow tier for everything important, fast tier for live brainstorm files

E. The Karpathy LLM Wiki — your "second brain"

Lean

Wiki lives at ~/projects/lovebuilt/wiki/. A symlink at ~/wiki points there so you can cd ~/wiki from anywhere.

Your daily journal stays in Obsidian (in iCloud Drive, not Documents) — that's where you write. A one-way mirror copies markdown files into ~/projects/lovebuilt/wiki/ where Claude Code reads them, GitHub versions them, and NotebookLM indexes them.

Future-proofing rule: nothing in any CLAUDE.md or skill should hardcode the wiki path other than via ~/wiki. Then it can move someday without breaking everything.

F. The path-rewrite job — how big is it?

Where	Refs	What we do
Inside N8N-BUILDER	82	sed + manual review
`~/.claude/skills` + `plans`	~422	sed + manual review
`~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl`	1,864	Don't touch. Symlink old → new.

The 1,864 references in .jsonl files are immutable session-history transcripts. Rewriting them would corrupt your conversation history. Instead, we'll leave a symlink so Claude Code can still find old sessions by their original path-derived IDs.

G. The "basecamp" router

Lean — minimum viable version

You said: "I never know which folder to start a new chat in." Solution: ~/projects/lovebuilt/_basecamp/ with a CLAUDE.md that's just an index — "if you want to do X, open folder Y."

Skill-ifying it (a /where-do-i-start command, free-models routing) is a v2 enhancement, not a blocker.

H. VS Code vs iTerm — the real answer

iTerm is the primary interface for Claude Code. VS Code is for editing.

Why: VS Code eagerly spawns every MCP server in .mcp.json the moment you open it — for 16 sessions that's ~534 processes. iTerm spawns MCP servers lazily on demand (~13 per active session).

The fresh-chat workflow

1. Open iTerm
2. cd ~/projects/lovebuilt/n8n
3. claude

  → loads only that folder's CLAUDE.md
  → loads only that folder's .mcp.json
  → no token bloat from sibling projects

What this chat will NOT do

This was the research / decisions phase. Nothing has been moved yet. The actual migration is a separate handoff that runs once you've read these decisions and signed off (or pushed back).

No files moved
No paths rewritten
No coach rename (deferred)
No wiki built (just decided where it goes)

Your next step

Read this. Push back on any "Lean" you don't like. Then dispatch the next chat with this prompt:

Read /Users/coach/.claude/plans/migration-research-handoff-calm-dewdrop.md
and execute it.

Produce the 4 deliverables under _dev0/migration/, do NOT move
any files or rewrite any paths, then /dev0-checkin Complete.

That fresh chat will run the NLM notebook inventory, write the formal architecture-decisions.md with rationale + trade-offs + open questions for each section above, and hand it back to you for sign-off before the actual move-files chat runs.