Comment by dcre
5 hours ago
One tip I have is that once you have the diff you want to fix, start a new session and have it work on the diff fresh. They’ve improved this, but it’s still the case that the farther you get into context window, the dumber and less focused the model gets. I learned this from the Claude Code team themselves, who have long advised starting over rather than trying to steer a conversation that has started down a wrong path.
I have heard from people who regularly push a session through multiple compactions. I don’t think this is a good idea. I virtually never do this — when I see context getting up to even 100k, I start making sure I have enough written to disk to type /new, pipe it the diff so far, and just say “keep going.” I learned recently that even essentials like the CLAUDE.md part of the prompt get diluted through compactions. You can write a hook to re-insert it but it's not done by default.
This fresh context thing is a big reason subagents might work where a single agent fails. It’s not just about parallelism: each subagent starts with a fresh context, and the parent agent only sees the result of whatever the subagent does — its own context also remains clean.
Yeah, I start most of my sessions now with “read the diff between this branch and main”. Seems like it grounds and focuses it.
Slight tangent: you want to read the diff between your branch and the merge-base with origin/main. Otherwise you get lots of spurious spam in your diff, if main moved since you branched off.
One thing that seems important is to have the agent write down their plan and any useful memory in markdown files, so that further invocations can just read from it
subagents are huge, could execute on a massive plan that should easily fill up a 200k context window and be done atnaround 60k for the orchestration agent.
as a cheapass, being able to pass off the simple work to cheaper $ per token agents is also just great. I've got a handful of tasks I can happily delegate work to a haiku agent and anything requiring a bit of reasoning goes to sonnet.
Feel like opus is almost a cheatcode when i do get stuck, i just bust out a full opus workflow instead and it just destroys everything i was struggling with usually. like playing on easy mode.
as cool as this stuff is, kinda still wish i was just grandfathered into the plan with no weekly limit and only the 5 hour window limits, id just be happily hammering opus blissfully.
IMO it seems to start "forgetting" or "overlooking" claude.md well before the context window is full.