February 2026
When Claude runs out of context window space, it shows a progress bar: "Compacting our conversation so we can keep chatting… 36%"
My instinct was to start a new chat. The progress bar felt like a warning, like the conversation was degrading. I'd open a fresh chat and say "search past chats for context on what we were working on."
This was wrong.
Compaction summarizes your conversation history and keeps a rich summary in the active context window. You lose some detail from earlier messages, but you retain the full arc: decisions made, context established, work in progress.
"Search past chats" from a new conversation is keyword search. It returns short snippets that match your query. Think grep, not replay. You get fragments, not the full working context of a long session.
The practical difference is huge:
| Continue after compaction | New chat + search | |
|---|---|---|
| Context richness | High, full summary in window | Low, keyword snippets |
| Effort to restore | Zero | You have to prompt for it |
| Risk of losing context | Low (degrades after 3+ compactions) | High |
Continue after compaction unless you're switching topics entirely or you're past your 3rd compaction in a single chat.
Anthropic's docs say: "Your full chat history is preserved so Claude can reference it." This creates a false equivalence. Users assume searching from a new chat gives them the same context as continuing. It doesn't.
A single line in the compaction UI would fix the mental model: "Your conversation has been summarized. We recommend continuing here. This preserves more context than starting a new chat."
Last updated: February 2026