Comment by skerit

I agree, I started doing something like that a while ago.

I've had great success using Claude Opus 4.5, as long as I hold its hand very tightly.

Constantly updating the CLAUDE.md file, adding an FAQ to my prompts, making sure it remembers what it tried before and what the outcome was. It became a lot more productive after I started doing this.

Using the "main" agent as an orchestrator, and making it do any useful work or research in subagents, has also really helped to make useful sessions last much longer, because as soon as that context fills up you have to start over.

Compaction is fucking useless. It tries to condense +/- 160.000 tokens into a few thousand tokens, and for anything a bit complex this won't work. So my "compaction" is very manual: I keep track of most of the things it has said during the session and what resulted from that. So it reads a lot more like a transcript of the session, without _any_ of the actual tool call results. And this has worked surprisingly well.

In the past I've tried various ways of automating this process, but it's never really turned out great. And none of the LLMs are good at writing _truly_ useful notes.