Every session has a finite . Once it’s full, Claude starts forgetting the earliest parts. Two commands keep your session healthy:
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/compact— Claude summarises the conversation so far and continues with the condensed version. Use this when you’re still on the same task but the session has grown long. You keep the relevant context; you lose the noise. -
/clear— wipes the conversation entirely and starts fresh. Use this when you’re switching to an unrelated task. Carrying old context into a new task makes Claude’s answers worse, not better, because it tries to relate the new task to whatever it remembers.
Rough rule: if you’re about to type “ignore everything we discussed before…”, you should have used /clear instead.