I went with an extra CURRENT.md for whatever extra info that might be useful for what I am working on and frequently /clear after each very small task. /compact is rarely used unless there are reasons to maintain a summary on what its working on.
Each new prompt involves asking Claude to read CURRENT.md for additional context.
I'm not sure if I should move this to CLAUDE.md but the stuff in CURRENT.md are very short term information that gets useless after a while.
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There is one time where Claude entirely messed up the directory when moving things around and it sort of stuck in a weird "panic" loop in chat for quite a while (involving oh no / oh dear in chat), nothing git can't fix, but I suspect is due to the directory info in CLAUDE.md getting stale. Ever since then I moved things that might get stale to a separate file and frequently keep it updated/trimmed as needed.
I do as well, with Codex though, but OP is asking for more fine grained control of what's in context and what can be thrown away.
You can simulate this of course by doing the reverse and maintaining explicit memory via a markdown files or w/e of what you want to keep in context. I could see wanting both, since a lot of the time it would be easier to just say "forget that last exploration we did" while still having it remember everything from before that. Think of it like an exploratory twig on a branch that you don't want to keep.
Ultimately I just adapt by making my tasks smaller, using git branches and committing often, writing plans to markdown, etc.
Isn't /clear enough to do that? I know some permissions survive from previous sessions, but it served me well
The one time I tried I felt like /clear may have dropped all my .claude files as well, but I didn’t look at it closely.
I went with an extra CURRENT.md for whatever extra info that might be useful for what I am working on and frequently /clear after each very small task. /compact is rarely used unless there are reasons to maintain a summary on what its working on.
Each new prompt involves asking Claude to read CURRENT.md for additional context.
I'm not sure if I should move this to CLAUDE.md but the stuff in CURRENT.md are very short term information that gets useless after a while.
---
There is one time where Claude entirely messed up the directory when moving things around and it sort of stuck in a weird "panic" loop in chat for quite a while (involving oh no / oh dear in chat), nothing git can't fix, but I suspect is due to the directory info in CLAUDE.md getting stale. Ever since then I moved things that might get stale to a separate file and frequently keep it updated/trimmed as needed.
I do as well, with Codex though, but OP is asking for more fine grained control of what's in context and what can be thrown away.
You can simulate this of course by doing the reverse and maintaining explicit memory via a markdown files or w/e of what you want to keep in context. I could see wanting both, since a lot of the time it would be easier to just say "forget that last exploration we did" while still having it remember everything from before that. Think of it like an exploratory twig on a branch that you don't want to keep.
Ultimately I just adapt by making my tasks smaller, using git branches and committing often, writing plans to markdown, etc.