Use /compact and /clear

Regularly using /compact and /clear is the most effective way to prevent "context rot" and manage spiraling API costs while working with Claude Code. Because Claude re-processes your entire conversation history with every new message, a session that has accumulated thousands of lines of terminal output and file diffs will eventually become expensive, slow, and prone to "forgetting" early instructions. Using /compact allows you to summarize long research or debugging threads into a lean set of key findings, effectively "zipping" the conversation so you can continue without losing essential progress. In contrast, /clear is vital when switching to an unrelated task; it wipes the current history to provide a clean slate.