strategic-compact

To preserve context across task phases, you should strategically compact long conversations at logical boundaries like milestone transitions or task switches instead of relying on arbitrary auto-compaction. This prevents important context from being crowded out by unrelated work.

You should use /compact during extended sessions after completing research, hitting a milestone, or before switching to an unrelated task. Compacting at these logical boundaries ensures continuity and prevents coherence degradation as tool usage climbs.

Conversation coherence degrades when sessions get long, tool-call counts increase, and context pressure builds up. Without strategic compaction at phase transitions, earlier context is lost to arbitrary auto-compaction, causing responses to lose track of the original task.

Strategic compaction works for multi-step coding, debugging, planning, and other extended workflows where continuity matters. It tracks tool-call counts and provides threshold-based reminders to help maintain context across complex task phases.

The best way to manage context pressure before switching tasks is to use phase-aware compaction reminders. By compacting at logical boundaries rather than waiting for auto-compaction, you preserve relevant context and maintain session coherence for the next phase.