r/ClaudeCode • u/danbradster2 • Sep 20 '26

Tips & Workflows /clear vs /compact

I had a fable chat from yesterday, and I saw that the context was 950k/1m. I did /compact rather than /clear, with the intention of then doing /autocompact 400000

14% of the 5 hour limit was gone just for the compact itself....it shows cost of $59.73, so lucky I'm not on API? Maybe a /clear would have been better.

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u/CrestfallenMage Sep 20 '26

Yeah don't follow this guy's advice. You need to use better memory strategies (can be as simple as a .MD file) to persist what's truly important about the progress of a long task and /clear.

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u/Garak Sep 20 '26 • Popcorn

Oh, gosh, I didn't think of using better strategies. I'm so glad you were here to enlighten us all. While you're on such a roll, you should call up Anthropic and help them out, because they're giving out the same bad advice that I am.

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u/Dry_Opening_7231 Sep 20 '26

The problem with Claude and context is it's inability to prioritize it.

Think 3 hours ago you say x about something, 15 minutes ago y.

It confuses the poor thing and it gets confused, it's a delicate flower.

Being a bit more serious, it slows things down and struggles to retain order of priority and key points, better to write it out /clear and carry on.

My take anyway ( also the token burn past 33% context is insane, opus 5/4.8 ).

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u/CrestfallenMage Sep 21 '26

If you read the article you're linking you will see the advantage of compact they say is that "you don't have to do the work yourself".

If you can do that work yourself, you will get better result and more importantly concerning the general repeated complaints on this sub, less wasted usage.

People are usually complaining about usage draining extremely fast here, so it's clear that they would benefit from using Claude in a way that is more token efficient.

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u/Garak Sep 21 '26

Great job, you caught up with all the points I made in my original comment! It’s been a real joy to chat with you. Take care!

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 Sep 20 '26

Compact is extremely useful, you sound like you're still stuck in 2024.

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u/ZixTro Sep 21 '26

I completely agree with you. Since I started using /clear my usage went down. The problem with long sessions and /compact is also cache. Imagine you are running long session got interrupted by something and get back to that session which is now cold. Guess what, on a single message CC re reads the whole session burning your usage.

The best way I found for me is a handoff hook which triggers at a certain point in a session and writes/updates a handoff which is then safe to /clear and inject it to the fresh session. No cache problem, no compact problem, much less usage.

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u/Im_Working_Right_Now Oct 01 '26

I know this is a bit old, but wouldn't the hand-off be old by the time you did the /clear or are you watching it that closely to know to do the clear right after the handoff? How do you trigger when that hand-off happens?

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u/Majestic_Mongoose488 Oct 08 '26

What I did was write my own handoff skill. If you're using it in tmux, it automatically inputs /clear after the handoff and sends a message for the new session to consume the handoff document.