Every has a finite . Once it’s full, Claude starts forgetting the earliest parts. Two commands keep your session healthy:
-
/compact— Claude summarises the conversation so far and continues with the condensed version. Use this when you’re still on the same task but the session has grown long. You keep the relevant context; you lose the noise. -
/clear— wipes the conversation entirely and starts fresh. Use this when you’re switching to an unrelated task. Carrying old context into a new task makes Claude’s answers worse, not better, because it tries to relate the new task to whatever it remembers.
Rough rule: if you’re about to type “ignore everything we discussed before…”, you should have used /clear instead.
What /compact costs you
is a summary, and a summary is lossy. Specific details — the exact error string, the file path you looked at once, the thing you tried that didn’t work — are the first casualties, because they don’t look important to a summariser. What survives is the shape of the conversation, not its particulars.
So: /compact buys you room to keep going, and the price is detail. That’s a fine trade for “we’re mid-task and the session has grown long”. It’s a bad trade for anything you’d be annoyed to lose.
For work you care about, hand off instead. Ask Claude to write a handoff pointing at the files that matter and naming what’s already been ruled out, then start a fresh session with it. You choose what survives rather than letting a summariser choose. See the handoff-not-summary tip.
Practical split:
- Mid-task, session getting long, details are all still on disk →
/compactis fine. - End of day, or anything you’d hate to re-derive → handoff, then
/clear. - Switching topic entirely →
/clear.
Compact before it compacts you
will auto-compact when the window fills. You can decide when that happens rather than accepting the default:
/autocompact“Set how full the context gets before auto-summarizing.” Setting it lower means more frequent, smaller summarisations instead of one big one at the worst moment. Run /context to see how full you actually are — it draws the window as a grid.