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Managing Context

Claude Code's output quality degrades as the context window fills up. Understanding and managing context usage is critical for long sessions.

The compaction threshold​

When context usage grows large, Claude Code's responses become less focused and more prone to errors. Run /compact proactively when you reach roughly 50% context usage. Do not wait for the automatic compaction, which triggers much later and may already be past the point of optimal performance.

Practical tips​

  • Check context usage with the status line or /cost command to see how much of the window you have used
  • Start new sessions for unrelated tasks instead of reusing a long-running session
  • Size subtasks so each one can complete well within 50% of available context
  • Use subagents for noisy tasks (large searches, exploring unfamiliar code) so the main context stays clean

Checkpointing​

Claude Code automatically tracks file edits with git-based checkpoints. If something goes wrong, you can rewind to a previous state:

  • Press Esc twice to undo the last set of changes
  • Use /rewind to go back to a specific checkpoint

This makes it safe to let Claude Code try ambitious changes: you can always roll back.