Comment by mritchie712 a day ago
> /clear + /catchup (Simple Restart): My default reboot. I /clear the state, then run a custom /catchup command to make Claude read all changed files in my git branch.
I've found myself doing similar workarounds. I'm guessing anthropic will just make the /compact command do this instead soon enough.
Weirdly, I’ve found that when that happens I can close Claude and then run `claude --continue` and now it has room to compact. Makes no sense.
But I have no idea what state it will be in after compact, so it’s better to ask it to write a complete and thorough report including what source files to read. Lot more work but better than going off the rails.
The old rule of thumb is that when you compact, you've already lost.
I've found the latency of /compact makes it unusable. Perhaps this is just the result of my waiting until I have 0% context remaining.
Fun fact, a large chunk of context is reserved for compaction. When you are shown that you have "0% context remaining," it's actually like 30% remaining that's reserved for compaction.
And yet, for some reason I feel like 50% of the time, compaction fails because it runs out of context or hits (non-rate) API limits.