Comment by lukevp
6 days ago
I reset context probably every 5-10 minutes if not more frequently, and commit even more often than that. If you’re going 5 hours between commits or context resets, I’m not surprised you’re getting bad results. If you ever see “summarizing”’in copilot for example, that means you went way too far in that context window. The LLMs get increasingly inaccurate and confused as the context window fills up.
Other things like having it pull webpages in, will totally blow away your context. It’s better to make a separate context just to pull a webpage down and summarize it in markdown and then reset context.
The 'best' trick I learned from someone over here when working with Claude Code is to very regularly go back a few steps in your context (esc esc -> pick something a few steps up) and say something like "yeah, I already did this myself, now continue and do Y"
It results helps keep the context clean while still keeping the initial context I provided (usually with documentation and initial plan setup) at the core of the context.
Now that you say this, I did notice webpages blow context but didn't think too much of it just yet, maybe there's some improvement to be found here using a subagent? I'm not a big fan of subagents (didn't really get proper results out of them in my initial experiments anyway) but maybe adding a 'web researcher' sub agent that summarizes to a concise markdown file could help here.
Now that's dangerous to do because the conversation history in Claude Code now also reverts the code to that point. So while this technique may have worked in the past, it no longer works.
Works fine. Reverting the code too is an option you can choose.