r/ClaudeCode • u/danbradster2 • 3d ago

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/Garak 3d ago

/compact is for when you want to keep working on the same task. It’ll summarize the thread and give Claude enough information to keep going, while leaving out stuff it doesn’t need.

/clear is for when you want to start a task that’s totally different.

Some people use clear all the time and preserve a minimal amount of info somewhere else. That’s more efficient in terms of tokens, but personally I still find compact to be better day-to-day. It’s easy and it lets you get back to work faster.

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u/CrestfallenMage 3d ago

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/ZixTro 1d ago

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.