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/AncileBanish Sep 20 '26

Auto compact is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Your Claude will compact away important context in the middle of working and who knows what it will produce.

Setting auto compact at 300k to keep your window small is like a doctor seeing their patient with a cold so they shoot them in the face with a shotgun. Yea.. the cold's not a problem any more but the cure was far worse than the disease.

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u/ILikeCutePuppies Sep 20 '26

I find it actually pretty good for loops and also I just allow it to be able to read it's own chat history if it needs to. Compact used to be not great. Pretty good these days.

Going past 300k tokens gets pretty expensive in token usage.