Managing Conversations

Conversations have a memory limit

Every conversation with Claude Code has a limited amount of working memory. Everything you type, every file Claude Code reads, every result it shows you. All of it fills the same shared space. Think of it like a whiteboard in a conference room. At the start of a meeting, the board is clean and there's plenty of room. As the meeting goes on, you fill it with notes, diagrams, and action items. Eventually there's no space left to write anything new.

Claude Code works the same way. A fresh conversation is a clean whiteboard. As you work, the conversation fills up with your instructions, Claude Code's responses, file contents, and command output. When it gets full, Claude Code starts losing track of earlier details. Instructions you gave at the beginning get overlooked. Results become less accurate.

This isn't a bug. It's a built-in constraint of how AI conversations work. The good news: once you understand it, managing it is straightforward.

Starting fresh with /clear

You've already seen /clear in earlier pages. Here's the full picture.

/clear wipes the conversation and starts from scratch. It's like erasing the whiteboard completely. Your files aren't affected. Nothing on your computer changes. Only the conversation resets.

The most important habit to build: use /clear between unrelated tasks.

If you just finished analyzing a sales report and now want to rename some files, those are two different tasks. The sales analysis is still taking up space on the whiteboard, but it has nothing to do with renaming files. Clear it out.

/clear

That's it. One command. Claude Code starts fresh, and your next prompt gets a clean whiteboard to work with.

Tip: Your CLAUDE.md file (covered in the next page) is automatically reloaded after every /clear. Preferences you've saved there carry over, even though the conversation itself resets.

When to /clear:

• You're switching to a different task
• Claude Code keeps making the same mistake despite corrections (the two-correction rule from earlier)
• The conversation feels unfocused, like Claude Code is mixing up details from different topics
• You've been working for a while and results seem less sharp than when you started

When NOT to /clear:

• You're still refining the same task (keep iterating instead)
• You need Claude Code to remember what it just did (the context will be lost)

Compacting instead of clearing

Sometimes you've been working on a task for a while and the whiteboard is getting full, but you're not done yet. You don't want to clear everything because you'd lose your progress.

That's what /compact is for.

/compact asks Claude Code to summarize the conversation so far and replace the full history with that summary. It's like taking a photo of the whiteboard, erasing it, and writing a condensed version of the key points. You keep working in the same conversation, but with more room.

/compact

You can also tell Claude Code what to focus on when compacting:

/compact focus on the data cleaning steps we agreed on

This helps Claude Code keep the details that matter and let go of the rest.

Tip: Claude Code also compacts automatically when the conversation gets very long. If you notice a brief pause and a message about summarizing, that's auto-compaction. Your CLAUDE.md file can include instructions for what to preserve during compaction. More on that in the next page.

/clear vs. /compact — when to use which:

Picking up where you left off

When you close Claude Code and open it again later, you get a fresh conversation. It doesn't remember what you were working on yesterday.

But your previous conversations aren't gone. Claude Code saves them automatically. You can go back to any previous session and continue from where you stopped.

To resume your most recent conversation:

claude --continue

This picks up right where you left off. Your full conversation history is restored: your messages, Claude Code's responses, all of it.

If you have several past conversations and want to pick a specific one:

claude --resume

This opens a list of your recent sessions. You can scroll through them, see what each one was about, and select the one you want to continue.

Tip: When you resume a session, Claude Code will ask you to re-approve permissions for file changes and commands. It doesn't assume you still want those permissions from a previous day.

Naming your sessions

By default, Claude Code identifies sessions by when they started and what you first asked about. That works fine when you have two or three sessions. It gets confusing when you have twenty.

You can give a session a name that makes it easy to find later:

/rename weekly-report

Now instead of scanning a list of timestamps, you can jump straight to that session:

claude --resume weekly-report

Name your sessions the way you'd name a folder — short, descriptive, and based on the task:

• sales-data-cleanup
• onboarding-doc
• quarterly-review
• marketing-assets

Tip: Think of named sessions like bookmarks. If you're doing a task you'll come back to over several days, name it. If it's a quick one-off, don't bother.

The one-task-per-session rule

Here's the single most important conversation management habit: one task per session.

Mixing unrelated tasks in the same conversation is the fastest way to get poor results. Claude Code's official documentation calls this the "kitchen sink session." You start analyzing data, then ask about renaming files, then go back to the data. By that point Claude Code is juggling three different contexts and doing none of them well.

The fix is straightforward:

1. Start a task
2. Work on it until it's done (or you've reached a good stopping point)
3. /clear or close Claude Code
4. Start the next task fresh

If you have a large task with multiple phases, you can use /compact between phases instead of /clear. But the principle holds: keep each conversation focused on one thing.

Checking what's in your conversation

If you're not sure how much space your conversation is using, you can check:

/context

This gives you a visual snapshot of how full the conversation is. It won't itemize every file and message, but it tells you whether you're near the limit.

If Claude Code seems to be getting less accurate or missing instructions, check /context first. The answer is often that the whiteboard is full and it's time to /clear or /compact.

Quick reference

Here are the conversation management commands you'll use most:

What's next

You know how to keep conversations focused and organize them over time. But there's one piece missing: Claude Code forgets everything between sessions. Next, we'll solve that with CLAUDE.md, a file that gives Claude Code lasting memory about your project and how you like to work.