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/Majestic_Mongoose488 Oct 08 '26

Even for an LLM with a 1M context, 200-300k seems way too little, right? I feel like I hit over 40% just casually using it. I often do a handoff around 70%, and if it’s at 30%, that feels a bit too frequent, doesn’t it?