I think people really need to focus more on working with limited contexts rather than trying to work around it. I really try to keep my sessions as short as possible and it helps a ton with keeping Claude (et al) focused.
replySpecifically, I like the "canary" trick that people have discussed where you add a small, innocuous rule to your CLAUDE.md like "When responding to me, start every sentence with my name." so that when Claude stops doing this, you know you've used way too much context and need to start a new session.
> The problem is, when the context window grows,
replyYou know the problem; then why not address it? Does Compacting the context not help?
Compacting the conversation almost never helps. It is uniformly worse than starting over with fresh context, or rewinding to a last-known-good state. It only exists because it increases engagement.
replyCompacting context compacts context. So Claude forgets a lot during compaction.
replyCompacting mostly gets rid of reasoning tokens, and honestly it would be nice of reasoning tokens did not constantly follow every follow up query. Asking even a simple/trivial question can have Claude use thousands of tokens. Compacting is good for getting rid of those.
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