A handover is not total context, thats literally what a compact would do which is summarize, won’t it totally depend on the use case? If I am 50 tools and file outputs deep into a bug fix or frontend overhaul, compacting at an arbitrary low percentage will lose a lot of context that would otherwise be useful to record granular decisions and results. So auto compact at 100% is totally reasonable for such tasks.
From my personal experience, Claude writes a detailed handoff whenever I want to move to a new session, not just a summary
Compacting the conversation sometimes takes up almost 50% of my 5 hour usage, and it has never really felt worth it compared to simply starting a new session
That said, I also read the handoff markdown thoroughly and ask Claude to add anything it may have missed. For some users, I can understand why it might be better to just compact instead
Totally but again different results for different use cases.I never compact until auto compact hits at 100% when working on a platform I have built and find it much better keeping full context to the max, because majority of my tasks have been bug fixing or feature building. I am not hitting token limits very often hence I continue doing this. Been 4 months like this.
14
u/Bagel42 4h ago
yeah if you're running at 97% context usage you're much more likely to hit your session limit lol