strategic-compact

To preserve context when approaching context window limits, you can compact your session by cataloging active tasks and key decisions, ranking them by retention value, and generating a concise state summary to retain essential information.

The best way to summarize a long coding session is to classify items as must keep, summarize, or discard, then generate a compact summary document listing modified files, design choices, and next steps before clearing the context.

Managing context window limits during multi-step refactors involves assessing tool call history and edited files, trimming verbose logs and completed search results, and keeping acceptance criteria intact within a compact summary.

Context compaction works for architecture discussions by evaluating session state, explicitly preserving design choices and decision rationale, and discarding low-value conversational filler to free up context space.

You can save a timestamped pre-compact snapshot of your session state before clearing it, allowing you to persist active tasks and modified files for later restoration if needed.

You should avoid automated context compaction if your session contains no verbose logs or completed searches to discard, as compacting very short sessions provides minimal context window relief and offers little retention value.