That is true, but I feel like sometimes if the conversation contains useful rational it can help to keep it. I think sometimes it is a judgement call, I will sometimes compress the context first.
If I feel like the model and I explored a lot of options I won't want to keep context as it might be confusing.
I think the more you use it the better judge you are of whether you should purge, compress, or just keep the context before executing the plan.
Models work best when they have short instructions and no noise. "Conversation [may] contain" also means "conversation has a lot of noise". It degrades performance and increases cost.
I use handoff skill to ask model to write a prompt for itself.
The applicability of your advice is very model dependent. Some like Claude have very good long context performance, whereas others they fall off much quicker past some threshold.
You're right that it's model dependent, even within Claude models.
I've found Opus 5 far better as a subagent with very limited context window use, which could suggest that it might not have good long context performance unlike its predecessors. (I was one of many tearing my hair out trying to work with Opus 5 for the past week.)
I am not only talking about "long context" performance (context rot), but also about noise that is confusing model about its goal (from correctly extracting operator's intent). I think every model will get confused to a degree, so clearing up irrelevant information from context helps a lot.
> That is true, but I feel like sometimes if the conversation contains useful rational it can help to keep it. I think sometimes it is a judgement call, I will sometimes compress the context first.
Yes, pretty much - if there’s a lot of noise and jumping around and wrong conclusions and corrections, compress and only leave the correct stuff (maybe make some plan file briefly mention what NOT to look at/do). But if it’s all fairly straightforward then can just proceed with the execution.
Most of the time the planning stage ends up short of 200k tokens anyways, it mostly takes hours just cause I’m slow and need to explore the various options - still cheaper than building the wholly wrong thing and having to redo everything.
Compressing the context can also drop important information so it might be better to only do that when you need to / use the plan mechanism/files / do it after completing some large stage of the plan and so on - so a judgement call.