Claude Operator: Prompt to Autonomy · 16 min · 110 XP
Managing a session's context
When to stay in a session, when to start fresh, and what compaction costs.
A session accumulates. Everything you've asked, every file that's been read, every command's output stays in view — which is what makes follow-up questions work. You can say "now do the same for the other handler" and it knows what "the same" means. Re-pasting the context every time is the beginner's tax, and staying in one session is how you stop paying it.
The same accumulation is a liability when you change subject. Switch from a CSS bug to a database migration in the same session and the earlier material is still there, quietly shaping answers — the model has been primed to think in terms of a problem you have finished with. A new topic deserves a new session. It costs you one command and removes a whole class of confusing answer.
For long work on one topic there's a middle option: compaction, which summarises the conversation so far and continues with the summary in place of the transcript. It buys room, and it is lossy by definition. After compacting, ask Claude to restate the current goal and constraints — if the restatement has drifted, correct it immediately rather than discovering the drift three edits later.
Find the commands in your own install. Interactive commands change more often than flags do. Type /help inside a session and read the list your version prints, rather than trusting a command name you read somewhere — including here.
Practice. Hold one session across a two-turn exchange where the follow-up clearly relies on what came before. Then switch to an unrelated task and deliberately start fresh, noticing what you no longer have to explain — and what you no longer have to undo. On a long session, run your version's compaction command and check that the goal survived it.
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