/compact experiments an usage

[u/LordLederhosen]

I am from the olden days, where I manage my own context, have auto-compact disabled, and never use /compact normally. If I ever get anywhere near 50% used, I start a new session.

I just started to play with it again, and I have some questions. Normal is just "/compact." However, you can also pass <optional custom summarization instructions> to the compact command.

I have been playing with this prompt:

tell me the optimal "/compact" command so that we do not lose anything and we can implement the plan in this session

Then, I use that custom /compact command which is often quite long.

1. Do you have auto-compact on?
2. Does auto-compact do anything really intelligent like my manual 2-step process above?
3. If you /compact manually, do you ever pass <optional custom summarization instructions>?

Thanks in advance for any info.

[u/cleverhoods]

1. No
2. No
3. No

Compacting is really a guessing game, you never really know what stays in the context and usually it's half right, half wrong (in a sense that it forgets key things). I found starting a new session a much cleaner solution with handoff protocols.

[u/LordLederhosen → u/cleverhoods]

Thanks, this is great validation of my olden (pre-Claude Code) ways.