Managing context on the Claude Developer Platform | Hacker News Reader

Managing context on the Claude Developer Platform

anthropic.com

220 pointsbenzguo90 comments

I wish every instruction and response had a enable/disable checkbox so that I can disable parts of the conversation in such a way that it is excluded from the context.

Let's say I submit or let it create a piece of code, and we're working on improving it. At some point I want to consider the piece of code to be significantly better that what I had initially, so all those initial interactions containing old code could be removed from the context.

I like how Google AI Studio allows one to delete sections and they are then no longer part of the context. Not possible in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, I think there one can only delete the last response.

Maybe even AI could suggest which parts to disable.

I kind of do this, semi-manually when using the web chat UIs (which happens less and less). I basically never let the conversations go above two messages in total (one message from me + one reply, since the quality of responses goes down so damn quick), and if anything is wrong, I restart the conversation and fix the initial prompt so it gets it right. And rather than manually writing my prompts in the web UIs, I manage prompts with http://github.com/victorb/prompta which makes it trivial to edit the prompts as I find out the best way of getting the response I want, together with some simple shell integrations to automatically include logs, source code, docs and what not.

I work similarly. I keep message rounds short (1-3) and clear often. If I have to steer the conversation too much, I start over.

I built a terminal tui to manage my contexts/prompts: https://github.com/pluqqy/pluqqy-terminal

Related, it feels like AI Studio is the only mainstream LLM frontend that treats you like an adult. Choose your own safety boundaries, modify the context & system prompt as you please, clear rate limits and pricing, etc. It's something you come to appreciate a lot, even if we are in the part of the cycle where Google's models aren't particularly SOTA rn

How are they not SOTA? They're all very similar with ChatGPT being the worst (for my use case anyway). Like adding lambdas and random c++ function calls into my vulkan shaders.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the most capable for my usecase in Pytorch as well. Large context and much better instruction following for code edits make a big difference.

Gemini 2.5 pro is generally non-competitive with GPT-5-medium or Sonnet 4.5.

But never fear, Gemini 3.0 is rumored to be coming out Tuesday.

based on what? LLM benchmarks are all bullshit, so this is based on... your gut?

Gemini outputs what I want with a similar regularity as the other bots.

I'm so tired of the religious thinking around these models. show me a measurement.

> LLM benchmarks are all bullshit

> show me a measurement

Your comment encapsulates why we have religious thinking around models.

Please tell me this comment is a joke.

The random people tweets I've seen said Oct 9th which is Thursday. I suppose we will know when we know.

Not sure if msty counts as mainstream but it has so many quality of life enhancements it’s bonkers.

They introduced removing from the end of the stack but not the beginning

I exit and restart CC all the time to get a “Fresh perspective on the universe as it now is”.

Isn't /clear enough to do that? I know some permissions survive from previous sessions, but it served me well

The one time I tried I felt like /clear may have dropped all my .claude files as well, but I didn’t look at it closely.

I do as well, with Codex though, but OP is asking for more fine grained control of what's in context and what can be thrown away.

You can simulate this of course by doing the reverse and maintaining explicit memory via a markdown files or w/e of what you want to keep in context. I could see wanting both, since a lot of the time it would be easier to just say "forget that last exploration we did" while still having it remember everything from before that. Think of it like an exploratory twig on a branch that you don't want to keep.

Ultimately I just adapt by making my tasks smaller, using git branches and committing often, writing plans to markdown, etc.

I went with an extra CURRENT.md for whatever extra info that might be useful for what I am working on and frequently /clear after each very small task. /compact is rarely used unless there are reasons to maintain a summary on what its working on.

Each new prompt involves asking Claude to read CURRENT.md for additional context.

I'm not sure if I should move this to CLAUDE.md but the stuff in CURRENT.md are very short term information that gets useless after a while.

---

There is one time where Claude entirely messed up the directory when moving things around and it sort of stuck in a weird "panic" loop in chat for quite a while (involving oh no / oh dear in chat), nothing git can't fix, but I suspect is due to the directory info in CLAUDE.md getting stale. Ever since then I moved things that might get stale to a separate file and frequently keep it updated/trimmed as needed.

> I like how Google AI Studio allows one to delete sections and they are then no longer part of the context. Not possible in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, I think there one can only delete the last response.

I have the same peeve. My assumption is the ability to freely edit context is seen as not intuitive for most users - LLM products want to keep the illusion of a classic chat UI where that kind of editing doesn't make sense. I do wish ChatGPT & co had a pro or advanced mode that was more similar to Google AI Studio.

/compact does most of that, for me at least

/compact we will now work on x, discard y, keep z

the trouble with compact is that no one really knows how it works and what it does. hence, for me at least, there is just no way I would ever allow my context to get there. you should seriously reconsider ever using compact (I mean this literally) - the quality of CC at that point is order of magnitute significantly worse that you are doing yourself significant disservice

You mean you never stay in a CC session long enough to even see the auto compaction warning?

100% - read this - https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09/15/ai-unit-of-work/

When you hit ^O after compact runs (or anytime), it tells you exactly what compact did, so it isn’t that mysterious

if you actually hit the compact (you should never be there no matter what but for the sake of argument) more often than not you'll see CC going off the rails immediately after compacting is done. it even doesn't know what it did let alone you :)

I’ll be releasing something shortly that does this, plus more.

The SolveIt tool [0] has a simple but brilliant feature I now want in all LLM tools: a fully editable transcript. In particular, you can edit the previous LLM responses. This lets you fix the lingering effect of a bad response without having to back up and redo the whole interaction.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45455719

FWIW, in Claude Desktop you can edit previous user context and Claude will fork the conversation from that point. I know it's not quite what you as asking for, but it's something.

There are 3rd-party chat interfaces out there that have much better context controls if it matters enough for you that you're willing to resort to direct API usage.

I think the main issue with removing certain previous responses from context would be that you no longer hit the cache for a large part of your chat history, which makes responses much more expensive and slow.

Its faster and cheaper (in most cases) to leave the history as is and hit the cache.

Context editing is interesting because most agents work on the assumption that KV cache is the most important thing to optimise and are very hesitant to remove parts of the context during work. It also sometimes introduces hallucinations, because parts of the context are with the assumption that eg tool results are there, but theyre not. Example Manus [0]. Eg, read file A, make changes on A. Then prompt on some more changes. If you now remove the "read file A" tool results, not only you break the cache, but in my own agent implementations(on gpt 5 at least) can hallucinate now since my prompt etc all naturally point to the content of the tool still beeing there.

Plus, the model got trained and RLed with a continuous context, except if they now tune it with messing with the context as well.

https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less...

We often talk about "hallucinations" like it is its own thing, but is there really anything different about it from the LLM's normal output?

AFAICT, no. I think it just means "bad, unhelpful output" but isn't fundamentally different in any meaningful way from their super-helpful top-1% outputs.

It's kind of qualitatively different from the human perspective, so not a useless concept, but I think that is mainly because we can't help anthropomorphizing these things.

Yes we had the same issue with our coding agent. We found that instead of replacing large tool results in the context it was sometimes better to have two agents, one long lived with smaller tool results produced by another short lived agent that would actually be the one to read and edit large chunks. The downside of this is you always have to manage the balance of which agent gets what context, and you also increase latency and cost a bit (slightly less reuse of prompt cache)

I found that having sub agents just for running and writing unit tests got me over 90% of my context woes

this sounds like a good approach, i need to try it. I had good results with using context7 in specialized docs agent. I wasn't able how to limit MCP to a subagent, likely its not supported.

Seems like that could be a job local LLMs do fairly well soon; not a ton of reasoning, just a basic ability to understand functions and write fairly boilerplate code, but it involves a ton of tokens, especially if you have lots of verbose output from a test run. So doing it locally could end up being a huge cost savings as well.

Maybe but you still need to pass some context to the sub agent to describe the system under test.

From what I can tell the new context editing and memory APIs are essentially formalization of common patterns:

Context editing: Replace tool call results in message history (i.e replace a file output with an indicator that it’s no longer available).

Memory: Give LLM access to read and write .md files like a virtual file system

I feel like these formalizations of tools are on the path towards managing message history on the server, which means better vendor lock in, but not necessarily a big boon to the user of the API (well, bandwidth and latency will improve). I see the ChatGPT Responses API going a similar path, and together these changes will make it harder to swap transparently between providers, something I enjoy having the ability to do.

> managing message history on the server, which means better vendor lock in

I feel that managing context should be doable with a non-SOTA model even locally. Just need a way to select/deselect messages from the context manually say in Claude-CLI.

> Enable longer conversations by automatically removing stale tool results from context Boost accuracy by saving critical information to memory—and bring that learning across successive agentic sessions

Funny, I was just talking about my personal use of these techniques recently (tool output summarization/abliteration with memory backend). This isn't something that needs to be Claude Code specific though, you can 100% implement this with tool wrappers.

I've been doing this for a bit, dropping summarized old tool output from context is a big win, but it's still level ~0 context engineering. It'll be interesting to see which of my tricks they figure out next.

I’m trying to understand what part of this is something we could not have hacked together already as clients? Maybe new sonnet is rl’ed to be able to use these memories in a better way?

Why client side? Doesn't that mean re-uploading the whole context whenever you change something? Seems like storing it server-side and providing an API to swap pieces in and out of context would be a lot more efficient. Or if the LLM is the one deciding what to swap, that could be done without client involvement at all. Even better would be if this API was standardized across providers.

Outside of context manipulation, it'd also be nice to standardize a format to label sections of the context and later append keywords to the context to ignore / unignore those sections (or refer back to them, emphasize them, whatever). With that, I imagine we'd be able to have a pretty good set of standard LoRA adapters that enable all LLMs to be controlled in the same fashion. That way agents will be able to manipulate LLMs in a standard way, without having to rewrite context itself.

I noticed this in the Claude Code interface, I reached "8% context left" but after giving it a huge prompt the warning disappeared, and it kept on working for another 20 minutes before reaching again "10% context left", but it never had to compact the history of the conversation. 10/10 great feature.

I don’t get it. I have been doing something similar for a month with opencode, is the new thing that the new sonnet model is fine tuned to call these tools “better” or simply that they have improved the devex to accomplish these things?

> I don’t get it. I have been doing something similar for a month with opencode, is the new thing that the new sonnet model is fine tuned to call these tools “better” or simply that they have improved the devex to accomplish these things?

They fine tuned 4.5 to have `clear_tool_uses` marker tools that it understands without regressing the quality of future responses. You will however pay for the cache invalidation hit anyways, so it would need some evaluations how much this helps.

Nice. When using OpenAI Codex CLI, I find the /compact command very useful for large tasks. In a way it's similar to the context editing tool. Maybe I can ask it to use a dedicated directory to simulate the memory tool.

Claude Code already compacts automatically.

I believe Codex CLI also auto compacts when the context limit is met, but in addition to that, you can manually issue a /compact command at any time.

Claude Code had this /compact command for a long time, you can even specify your preferences for compaction after the slash command. But this is quite limited and to get the best results out of your agent you need more than rely on how the tool decides to prune your context. I ask it explicitly to write down the important parts of our conversation into an md file, and I review and iterate over the doc until I'm happy with it. Then /clear the context and give it instructions to continue based on the MD doc.

Codex was only explicit last time I checked

CC also has the same `/compact` command if you want to force it

/clear too

/compact accepts parameters, so you can tell it to focus on something specific when compacting.

Context management is one of those things that seems simple until you actually build with it. We've run into issues where Claude loses important context halfway through complex tasks. Love the idea of being able to mark parts of the conversation as 'resolved' or 'outdated' would be huge.

I'll let them (ai companies) figure it out while i keep coding manually.

I'll wait for the day they will release a js library to programmatically do all this llm context juggling, instead of using a UI, and then I will adopt it by doing what I do now, writting code.

I will write code that orchestrates llms for writting code.

Edit: This is obviously a joke... but is it really a joke?

Edited version:

We try to solve a similar problem to put long documents in context. We built an MCP for Claude to allow you to put long PDFs in your context window that go beyond the context limits: https://pageindex.ai/mcp.

this is about difficulty thing, it is about maintaining knowledge during long execution what is IMO exiting is long term memory in things like Claude code, where model could learn your preferences as you collaborate. (there is already some hard disabled implementation in CC)

Just a heads-up: HN folks value transparency, so mentioning if it's yours usually builds more trust.

Thanks for the reminder, I have edited the comment.

This is hilarious. It’s like they took my usage pattern and made it native. Love it.

I wish claude code supported the new memory tool. The difference is CLAUDE.md is always in your active context while the new memory stuff is essentially local RAG.

Why are both this new Memory API and the Filesystem as (evolving) Context releases only for the Developer API - but not integrated into Claude Code?

I had this same thought. I’m not entirely following how I’m to differentiate between these two things. I guess the API is to create my own CC type agent. But I’ve heard of folks creating agents that are CC based as well.

How do you know it’s not integrated into Claude code yet?

I want to really get into anthropic.

For context: I have background in CV and ML in general. Currently reviewing and revising RL.

Any idea how I can get into RL?

I have 3 years of industry/research experience.

Whenever I see post like this, it triggers a massive fomo creating a scene of urgency on I should work in these problems.

Not being able to work here is making be anxious.

what does it take for someone in Non-US/Non-EU region to get into big labs such as these?

Do I really have to pursue PhD? I am already old that pursuing PhD is a huge burden that I can't afford.

The pace is so fast, if you have FOMO you've already missed out most probably. If you're interested in LLM flavored RL, I'd suggest prime-rl (and their discord) community, hugging face RL courses with smol (you'll need pro and burn a couple of bucks), etc. etc.

Willing to burn few bucks here and there for the projects.

Really need to get hands dirty here. I remember taking RL course from coursera during 2020 covid. I didn't have the chance to apply it in the problems I worked post covid.

But I really want to start doing RL again. Interested in world models and simulation for RL.

If you're good on theory (meaning able to read theory), but interested in non-LLM stuff, pufferlib and it's programmer also seem quite accessible (if you haven't come across it already).

I'll address something else: Fomo is usually a symptom of an underlying deeper issue. Long before Anthropic/Openai, we had these same posts about people desperately wanting to get into Google. They got unhealthy obsessed about this goal that they started prepping for months, even years, documenting their journey on blogs only to get rejected by someone who spent 2 seconds on their application. Getting in is more about luck than most people realize. Once you're in, you had for a long time a skewed romanticized fantasy of what it's like to work at this mythical company (Anthropic isn't a startup by any stretch anymore) only to crash hard and realize it is a classic corporate environment.

It may be harsh but the reality is, if you have to ask you’re likely not a viable candidate.

The leading AI companies have the kind of capital to be able to hire the very best of the industry. If you’re only just starting now and even worse yet need your hand held to do so you’re totally out of the running…

so what would be wise to do in this situation? leave the hope and surrender or completely start out and work in a nascent field?

Build up experience. There's no shortcuts

You're basically like a junior dev trying to apply to be a lead dev for a team at Google

The hardest part of that journey is that there are a _lot_ of people out there now thinking the same thing. It is really difficult to get into these jobs without a network helping you.

Would this mean cursor and cline don’t have to do context management? Their value is much more just in the ui now?

I don't think cline ever had to do much context management, which is why i prefer them over cursor. Cline is similar to claude code, but without the vendor lock in.

I just want Anthropic to release a way to remove my payment method from Claude before the eventual data breach.

Don’t they use Stripe? You can remove your payment method at any time. But Anthropic doesn’t really have your info in the first place.

How? First I wanted to just use iOS In-App-Purchases like ChatGPT and Grok etc all support, but Anthropic has this "We're too special" syndrome and don't offer IAP so I had to sign in on the website (and guess what, iOS app supports Sign In With Apple but the website doesn't) and add my card… but no way to remove the card later.

Steam and others have figured it out, but Anthropic/Discord (who just had a breach like yesterday) still don't let you remove your payment info.

My Claude subscription is through iOS IAPs.

I could swear I didn't even see the option for an IAP on iOS… maybe it's region-locked?

Maybe, but I wouldn't suggest doing it even if you figure it out. It has some really annoying side effects on subscription management for Claude, and additionally they mark up the plan cost by 20%. Which I didn't care about on the $20 Pro, but now with $200 plans.

I haven't figured out* how to switch to a direct subscription other than cancelling and resubscribing, and I'm afraid of messing up my account access.

* Caveat that I haven't spent more than 20 minutes trying to solve this.

Interestingly we rolled out a similar feature recently.

I am working on a World Atlas based approach to computer use agents. If the task and app environment are reused, building an atlas of states and policies might be better than observe-plan-execute. We don't rediscover from scratch how an app works every time we use it.

Do you have any links where I can read more about your approach?

so this is what claude code 2 uses under the hood? at least i got the impression it stays much better on track than the old version

it doesnt use it yet

Hopefully one day Anthropic will allow zipfile uploads like ChatGPT and Gemini have allowed for ages.

That’s powerful. Most of the differences I can see between AI generated output and human output comes from the « broad but specific » context of the task. I mean company culture, organization rules and politics, larger team focus and way of working. It may take time to build the required knowledge bases but it must be worth it

At Zenning AI, a generalist AI designed to replace entire jobs with just prompts. Our agents typically run autonomously for hours, so effective context management is critical. I'd say that we invest most of our engineering effort into what is ultimately context management, such as:

1. Multi-agent orchestration 2. Summarising and chunking large tool and agent responses 3. Passing large context objects by reference between agents and tools

Two things to note that might be interesting to the community:

Firstly, when managing context, I recommend adding some evals to our context management flow, so you can measure effectiveness as you add improvements and changes.

For example, our evals will measure the impact of using Anthropics memory over time. Thus allowing our team to make a better informed decisions on that tools to use with our agents.

Secondly, there's a tradeoff not mentioned in this article: speed vs. accuracy. Faster summarisation (or 'compaction') comes at a cost of accuracy. If you want good compaction, it can be slow. Depending on the use case, you should adjust your compaction strategy accordingly. For example, (forgive my major generalisation), for consumer facing products speed is usually preferred over a bump in accuracy. However, in business accuracy is generally preferred over speed.

lol, good luck with that

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