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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