I put context size in my Claude Code status bar and ... it does get "tired" when it's at 50%-60% context. I figured this out when I'm like "now modify the testbed to run this and add a test to exercise blah blah blah" and it was just like "That would be a substantial infra lift." In my head I say "I am paying a substantial amount for you to do this!" but just type /compact and re-prompt and my "substantial infra lift" is done without complaint.

I guess everyone needs a nap after a long day of conversing and writing code. So like us!

/compact is prone to error and I wouldn't recommend it in the middle of work. But when you are switching to a related but not completely new task, it helps. ("Now write the integration tests." vs. "on foo.go line 476 that you just wrote, I think there is a deadlock with bar.go line 123 that you just added". It doesn't really need the context to write the tests, it can get that by reading the code. But for iterating on lines of code it just produced, /compact is going to throw away whatever "thought process" led to that code and it's usually not a great thing to do.)