My note-taking system is, frankly, in the best possible words, an absolute mess. All my notes are spread across random pages within my Notion dashboard (which I then need to spend hours organizing). I often feel like I spend more time bringing my notes into a reasonable format that the future me would actually want to revisit, than I do writing the notes myself. Most of the time I just give up note-taking halfway through the class and end up relying on my memory — that doesn't remember so much as what I had for breakfast earlier today.

Of course, going that route is just counter-productive and does no good. It's not like I haven't tried to fix this. I've spent hours perfecting my note-taking setup by building linked dashboards, color-coded tags, rollup properties, and relation databases in Notion. For about two weeks, it genuinely feels like I've figured it out. Before I know it, the beautiful system I spent hours perfecting collects dust because of one thing or the other, and I do it all over again the semester that follows. That cycle (build the perfect system, use it for two weeks, abandon it, repeat) is what finally made me question what the underlying problem here really is. Is it that I simply haven't found the right app, or is it that I've been spending more energy on the system than on the actual notes?

So this time, I didn't download another app or try to build my Notion note-taking system from ground zero. Instead, I made a folder on my desktop, opened a terminal, and typed claude. I haven't opened my Notion notes section in days, and even ended up canceling my subscription.

The problem with every note-taking system I've used

The one thing every note-taking system I've tried has in common is friction. There's always something standing between me hearing something in class and actually getting it written down. In Notion, that friction looked like deciding which database a note belongs in, what properties to fill out, which template to use, how to format the headings. It sounds small, but in the middle of a lecture, those tiny decisions add up fast.

Beyond this friction making note-taking a lot harder than it needed to be, it actively made me worse at learning (which again, became another reason to ditch the setup for god). I'd be sitting in class fiddling with formatting or figuring out where a note should go, and meanwhile the professor has moved on to the next concept entirely. I'd look up and realize I missed something important because I was too busy organizing the thing I'd just written down instead of listening to what came next.

So, in hindsight, the system I was using to help me retain information was the very thing causing me to miss it in the first place. I needed a system where I'd just take the notes in any way I wanted (enough to capture what was being covered) and have everything else handled for me after the fact. I didn't want to think about where a note goes or what it should look like while I'm still in class trying to listen. I just wanted to dump my thoughts and move on.

All I needed was a folder and a terminal

Turns out, all I needed to do to set a system like the one I described above was create a folder on my desktop and open Claude Code inside it. If you aren't familiar with Claude Code, it's Anthropic's terminal-based agentic coding tool that's been going viral across tech (and truthfully, non-tech) circles lately. I've been using it for all sorts of non-coding tasks, and I'm surprised it took me so long to set it up for my note-taking process too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I've been using Claude Code's voice mode feature to brain-dump my chaotic morning thoughts and have Claude turn them into a clean, organized to-do list for the day. The note-taking system I've developed here is heavily inspired by that idea, and it follows the same core principle of just getting everything out and letting Claude worry about making it pretty later. Given that I just want to jot down the notes without thinking about formatting or anything, the medium I take them on doesn't really matter. I can open a blank page on Notion, on my phone's notes app, send them to myself using any instant messaging app, or use the terminal directly. It genuinely doesn't matter in this case.

So, I started off by creating a folder on my desktop called SemesterNotes, opened my terminal, navigated into it, and launched Claude Code. I told it what courses I'm taking this semester and asked it to set things up for me. Within seconds, it created a folder for each course, generated an HTML dashboard I can open in my browser to see everything at a glance, and most importantly, created a CLAUDE.md file. This is the one file that single-handedly holds this entire system together and why it hasn't fallen apart like every other setup I've tried.

A CLAUDE.md file basically acts as a set of instructions that Claude Code reads every time you start a new session within that directory. It's a plain markdown file you can edit whenever you want, but it lets you define how Claude should behave inside that specific folder. In this case, my CLAUDE.md file tells Claude what courses I'm taking, what the folder structure should look like, and how I want my notes formatted and organized. This way, when I come back tired from a lecture and dump a messy block of text (or just type it in the terminal and hit send), Claude already knows where to file it, how to format it, and what structure to follow without me needing to say a single thing.

All I need to do from my end is open my terminal, navigate to that directory, and tell it what course the notes are for. While I could've theoretically made the CLAUDE.md file myself, I decided to add a step to my initial setup where I gave Claude an example of notes I had taken in Notion during my last semester and asked it to pick up on the patterns — how I structure things, what formatting I tend to use, how I organize information. It then used those patterns to build out the CLAUDE.md file and now generates all my notes as HTML files that follow the same style. I then wanted to take this system a bit further. Since Claude reads the CLAUDE.md every session, I realized I could just keep adding to it, and the entire system would improve without me changing how I use it at all.

So now, every note Claude generates doesn't just contain what I told it. It starts with a recap section that automatically pulls from all the previous notes in that subject folder, so I never open a file without context on what came before. If my notes are incomplete, or I wrote something like "idk why this works yet," Claude picks up on that and tries to answer it in a dedicated section called "Beyond the Notes," where it adds 3–5 extra things I didn't mention but probably should know. Common mistakes, related concepts, things the professor will likely bring up next.

And then, my personal favorite part, every single note comes with a set of interactive flashcards and a full quiz mode built right in. I don't need Quizlet. I just open the same HTML file I was studying from, scroll down, and start testing myself. The flashcards have difficulty ratings, the quiz tracks my score and highlights weak areas, and it all lives inside that one file.

All of this happens because of a single markdown file sitting in my folder that I set up once. Claude also went ahead and created an index.html file that acts as a master dashboard for everything. It lists all my subjects, links to every note I've taken, and shows a note count per course. I can open it in my browser and see my entire system at a glance. Every time I create a new note, Claude automatically updates the dashboard too. It's basically my Notion homepage, except it's a single HTML file on my desktop that loads instantly and doesn't need a subscription

The best part is that it learns from my existing notes

With Notion, or any note-taking app for that matter, the problem is that your process remains stagnant until you manually go in and change something. You have to update the template, reconfigure the database, tweak the layout yourself. The system only changes when you put in the work to change it. With Claude Code, it's the opposite. The entire system runs on how I take my notes, and that's why it works.