Claude Operator: Prompt to Autonomy · 14 min · 110 XP
Continue, resume, and choose a model
Pick up the right past session, and pick the model on purpose.
Sessions outlive the terminal window. --continue picks up the most recent one; --resume lets you choose from earlier sessions. The difference matters more than it looks: "most recent" is a guess about which conversation you mean, and it's wrong exactly when you've been working on two things.
claude --continue # the latest session claude --resume # choose from earlier sessions claude --model sonnet # start on a specific model
Whichever you use, open with a question rather than an instruction: "what are we working on, and what's left?" A session that restates the goal correctly is one you can trust to continue; a session that restates it wrongly has just saved you from acting on a misunderstanding.
--model chooses the model for the session. The honest rule is to fit it to the task: a fast model is right for mechanical, well-specified work, and a more capable one earns its cost on ambiguous problems where being wrong is expensive. Choosing by habit means paying more than you need for simple things, or less than you should for hard ones.
Practice. Leave a session, continue it, and ask Claude to restate the current goal. Then find and resume a specific earlier session rather than assuming the latest is the one you want, noting its id and checking the restatement. Start a practice session with an explicit model and confirm the session reports the model you chose.
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