For a new task, use /clear; to keep working on the same task with a shorter recap, use /compact. Claude Code context includes the conversation and material it has read—not just your latest prompt. Old or irrelevant information does not literally spoil, but it can compete for attention with what you need now.
What Claude Code context contains—and why freshness matters
Context is the working material available to Claude Code during a session. It includes the conversation and content Claude Code has read, so a long session can contain far more than the latest request. Anthropic describes “context rot” as a risk that performance may degrade as context grows: attention is spread across more tokens, and older, irrelevant material can distract from the current task. This is a qualitative explanation, not a quantified guarantee that cleanup will improve results by a particular amount.
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Anthropic technical staff member Thariq Shihipar puts the practical stakes this way: “How you manage sessions, context, and compaction in Claude Code shapes your results more than you might expect.” (Anthropic, April 15, 2026.)
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| Choice | Use it when | What carries forward | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|---|
/clear |
You are switching tasks or the old discussion is no longer relevant. | Project files and project memory, including CLAUDE.md. |
Conversation history is removed. Save any task state you may need later. |
/compact |
You want to continue the same task with a shorter conversation recap. | A selective summary of earlier conversation. | The summary may omit details unless you specify what matters. |
| Do nothing yet | The task is still focused and the context indicator is not a concern. | The full conversation remains available. | Older material stays in the working context. |
In short: clear for a clean break; compact for continuity. Anthropic’s Help Center recommends clearing when switching tasks and compacting when continuing work (Help Center: Models, usage, and limits in Claude Code).
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How to compact without losing important task details
Because compaction produces a summary rather than preserving every exchange verbatim, steer it when specific details are essential. Before compacting, identify the decisions, filenames, constraints, and next steps that the next stretch of work needs.
- Check that you are continuing the same task, rather than moving to unrelated work.
- Run
/compactin Claude Code. If the task depends on particular decisions, files, constraints, or next steps, tell Claude to preserve those in the summary. - Continue from the recap and correct it if a critical detail is missing.
Keep durable project instructions concise and current
Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md automatically at session start. Use it for stable project conventions and essential facts, not a running transcript of one task. Review the file periodically and remove instructions that are stale or no longer useful. Keep temporary task state in the active conversation or in a deliberate handoff instead.
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Anthropic’s Help Center suggests keeping CLAUDE.md under roughly 200 lines as a rule of thumb, not a universal limit or a measured threshold. Its guidance on project memory and prompting is at Give Claude context: CLAUDE.md and better prompts.
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Claude Code provides a context indicator and the /context command. Use them to inspect the current session rather than following a made-up percentage rule. Anthropic says Claude Code can compact automatically near its context limit, so users will rarely hit a hard wall; its Help Center does not establish one fixed trigger that applies to every model, plan, or version. Automatic compaction is a fallback, not a reason to leave irrelevant task history in place.
Anthropic’s API documentation describes configurable, threshold-based compaction as an API capability. That is separate from claims about the exact automatic-compaction trigger in Claude Code itself (Compaction at a token threshold). Use the Claude Code interface and its current documentation for session behavior; do not assume an API setting controls the app.
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