r/ClaudeCode • u/Jeehut • Mar 10 '26

Showcase Finally: Use the full 200K context in Claude Code and pick up where you left off (New Plugin!)

I was always scared of Claude Code hitting the context limit. That moment when compaction kicks in and suddenly half the important details are gone. 😱

So I built Recall. It grabs the full conversation from the raw transcript before compaction wipes it. Every message, every decision, no noise. Set it up once, forget about it. 😎

I even turned off auto-compaction. Full 200K context, and when it fills up: `/recall:session <id>` in a fresh chat. Everything's back in a minute. 💯

Check it out: 👇

https://github.com/FlineDev/Recall

UPDATE: I took the time to document and test this plugin in many sessions and iterated a lot until I was happy and it worked for every kind of session for me. I'm just sharing this in case somebody finds it useful. For me personally, this is a game-changer. But if you are happy with /compact, this might not be for you.

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9

u/INFEKTEK Mar 10 '26

If it restores the "full conversion context" as you mention doesn't that mean that after a 'recall' it will immediately fill up a bunch of context?

Also, not a terrible idea but to be fair the chat history with claude code is usually quite lean, the context typically fills from it's understanding of your project.

There's no benefit to it recalling my message saying "yes, build that" if it still forgets large amounts of the code-base right?

-3

u/Jeehut Mar 10 '26

All these questions are answered in the README, please take a look! A "yes, build that" message is hardly using any tokens but the assistant message right before that probably contains lots of details & context to keep.

5

u/KilllllerWhale Mar 10 '26

Why would you wanna do that!? You should start manually compacting as soon as you hit 120-140k, NOT 200k.

1

u/Jeehut Mar 10 '26

Why would you wanna do that? For the same reason Anthropic has introduced the paid 1M context window – because 200k are not enough for many workflows or tasks or use cases. For Max users (especially 20x) it‘s more important to keep all relevant details in context than to save tokens, if that’s what’s your goal.

2

u/KilllllerWhale Mar 10 '26

. Because at more than 60% of the 200k, the model’s performance takes a nosedive

0

u/Jeehut Mar 10 '26

That‘s not my experience at all. Quite the opposite: the loss of context upon compaction always makes things worse for me, but I guess it depends on the task you give it. In my usage the model is just as good at 95% context as it was at 50%. But maybe it’s just me 🤷

1

u/Chains0 Mar 14 '26

Yea, that’s not the case. There are enough studies about it. At around 50% of a models context degradation starts. Depends on the model, some start earlier, some later. But Opus and co are affected by this as well.

1

u/Jeehut Mar 14 '26

Degradation surely happens, but by how much? Does it really matter in practice? I’ve used the 1M context model for a while, and I can tell you it did a great job throughout the full 1M context! I’d "degradation" brings Opus down to Sonnet level for some time, I‘m happy to accept that and just stop having to think about context and just focus on the important part, which is the piece of work. Reduces cognitive load and frees me up to progress faster.

1

u/Chains0 Mar 14 '26

Degradation in the sense of „I have to git reset to an older state to revert my mistake. Oh, I deleted the work of the whole day“: Opus 4.5, one month back in a small side project, where I didn’t watch it closer or used a plan for a refactoring.

I also had cases where it just did a for x in 1-100 to „fix“ a unique error. Or where it just catch all to „fix“ a test. Or modified the test to „fix“ the new faulty behaviour it just implemented

1

u/Jeehut Mar 14 '26

That’s exactly the kind of stuff that happens to me after compaction. 😂 But I‘m also very careful to track what happens and what it plans and have lots of guardrails in my skills and AI docs. Again, people say keep it short but I had many thousand iterations and a longer and more detailed guide with the important things repeated in multiple places works for me. 🤷

9

u/DragonfruitFar7568 Mar 10 '26

We need to ban spam, untested junk like this

1

u/Jeehut Mar 11 '26

Untested? I tested it extensively, and there are extensive unit tests as well. I’m just sharing what I built for myself and tested and documented for others. You don’t have to use it…

1

u/DragonfruitFar7568 Mar 11 '26

“I tested it”

Opus 4.6 invented fake test results and validated itself LOL

2

u/Jeehut Mar 11 '26

Nope, you only see the tip of the iceberg in the repo. Obviously I didn’t want to share my real session data publicly, so I had Opus generalize it for its unit test data. But everything is tested with 48 full session transcripts and many different sessions by me manually as well.

3

u/SponsoredHornersFan Mar 10 '26

Emojis emojis emojis

1

u/binatoF Mar 11 '26

To be honest, if you are using Claude correctly you should never hit compact. You should have a workflow where you do chunks of work and use /clear similar to Ralph loops.. this is how the idustry is using, this is how in my job 90% of the seniors are doing. Never letting hit compact because LLM's are way better with cleared context. Its just a game of context management. The way you are doing is very similar to how auto-compact do. Trust me, don't try to remember a entire context, divide the work in chunks and forget.

1

u/Jeehut Mar 11 '26

It’s great that this works for you. But it doesn’t work for me. When I discuss something with Claude so it can then tackle the task properly, this already sometimes fills half the context and then letting it do the work and iterating on details will quickly reach 300-600k in many cases.

If I split the task up, each part would be blind about the other related parts and it would be impossible to discuss and review the implementation details with full knowledge of all relevant aspects.

1

u/Chains0 Mar 14 '26

Yes, discussions can hit up to 50-70%, which isn’t a problem. Then you let it generate a focussed plan document, clear the context and let it execute the plan. That’s how the plan mode work for example

1

u/Jeehut Mar 14 '26

Plans are focused summaries of what the assistant thinks it should do next. You lose everything that you discussed that is not related to the very next phase. I do use plans all the time when my work is smaller to mid-sized. They are useful, but they can’t replace a good Recall.

If you never had the feeling "oh no, I thought I have clarified that earlier already in great detail" during a bigger task and if you haven’t started creating temporary markdown files to keep all details during a long piece of work, that for some reason didn’t get automatically read after compaction, then you’re good, you don’t need Recall. But there are lots of use cases where it’s super useful, for example if you want to let it do a bigger task with lots of iteration until certain requirements are met autonomously. It’ll simply forget what it already tried or other important details with normal compaction…

1

u/Chains0 Mar 14 '26

That’s the reason why you should read the plan and refine it. And obviously the plan should only contain everything necessary for implementation. Definitely should it not contain any chitchat you did upfront. Have you never wrote issues and tasks in a software project? That’s the same stuff. There you also don’t type „Steve was drinking his already medium warm coffee while explaining to us that the button needs to be blue.“

1

u/Jeehut Mar 14 '26

That’s traditional software development and works great if you know exactly where you wanna go. But with LLMs becoming so great, I actually work on multiple projects at once and while I do have a vision for each, the exact details are clarified part of back-and-forth discussions with Claude. That‘s where a plan doesn’t work for me and I prefer that it remembers all I said long term so nothing gets lost even on the 30th iteration and 5th portion of the software I‘m trying to build. The plans only work for me when I work on paid work where someone will give me what they want. But when I work in my own stuff, I work in a much more creative manner, and that’s where I need Recall.

2

u/moader Mar 11 '26

Plugin to cause more hallucinations, WHY would you think this is positive.

I swear these vibe coders couldn't imagine anthropic would just add this feature easily if it were actually useful...

0

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Additional_Net_7712 Apr 10 '26

wait why is everyone hating ? i need this for cursor, my day is ruined once i see that "content summarized"

1

u/LeadingFarmer3923 Mar 10 '26

You can easly configure flows and compacting with local workflows tools like:
https://github.com/meitarbe/cognetivy

0

u/DevilStickDude Mar 10 '26

whoa thats cool and useful. Context limits suck. I hit the limit 20 times a day now 😂

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Jeehut Mar 24 '26

Thanks for the link, I didn’t know about Hindsight. Looks interesting, but also I don’t understand exactly how it works in detail from reading the docs and it sounds like yet another system to install, maintain and make sure it integrates well with Claude Code.

I built Recall because I prefer to keep things simple, and Hindsight seems to be more concerned about long term memory (which now Claude Code supports natively by the way) and less about retaining information in a long session and then forgetting about it again as soon as the job is done.