Comment by jaggederest
3 days ago
I think there are two motivations that get blurred pretty quickly:
a) you find a particular context that executes well and want to preserve parts of it or not have to repeat explanations
b) you want to continue a session so you don't have to rebuild the context from scratch
I think A is something where it's totally reasonable to preserve pieces as part of like a prompt library or equivalent, or directory-specific agent files, that kind of thing.
I think B is much more likely to lead to problems if you do it over a long time, but it can be pretty useful for getting the last drop of juice out of the metaphorical orange.
I think the antipattern (that I've done myself, admittedly) is swapping between different restored contexts for different tasks or roles - at that point you should be either converting it to more durable documentation if warranted, or curating it more specifically than "restore the entire context" even if it's just one-off.
I think the answer for both cases is supposed to be finishing a "good" session with "based on what you've learned about this project, please update the CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/README.md files."
Ideally that replaces the back and forth cycle of it's this, no it's that, it's that for reasons XYZ with a single ingestible blob that gets the agent up to speed.
I've actually had mixed results with that without some manual curation - sometimes by the time a session has gone on for a while (heaven forbid it go through multiple compactions), the agent has so much extraneous/incorrect context for docs that it can't write documentation effectively.
Sometimes it's better to dump context incrementally, reinitialize the agent with a subset of the context, or manually prime it, then ask it to write documentation as a focused task.
Yeah, I also agree that A is good in many cases.