Compact Mode Strategies

When Claude's context window fills up, it compacts — summarizing earlier conversation turns to make room for new ones. Compaction preserves the most important information but loses details. You can influence what survives compaction by structuring your sessions strategically.

The key insight: CLAUDE.md content survives compaction better than conversation content because it is loaded as system context, not as conversation turns. This means the most important facts about your project should live in CLAUDE.md, not in your prompts. A rule stated in CLAUDE.md persists through compaction. A rule stated in turn three of a thirty-turn conversation might not. This is another reason the CLAUDE.md-as-cache strategy pays dividends — it is not just efficient, it is durable.