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Auto-compact / compaction failed — page 3

The conversation-compaction step errored or looped instead of shrinking context.

379 issues · 31 open · 348 resolved (92%) · first seen Mar 6, 2025

First response · account

What to do now

Most likely: Authentication, usage state or session size blocked the request.

  1. Check the exact account, organization and usage window currently selected.
  2. Try a new short session before deleting credentials or local history.
  3. If the state is inconsistent across machines, preserve diagnostics and re-authenticate once.

These are conservative triage steps, not an official Anthropic fix. Use the issue and workaround evidence below before making a destructive configuration change.

Is this getting better or worse?

This class of problem is converging. 52 new reports in the last 90 days vs 75 in the 90 before — -31%. The open backlog peaked at 49 in 2025-10 and sits at 31 today.

0 12 25 37 49 2025-032025-092026-032026-08
2025-03 — First reports2025-10 — Peak backlog (49 open)2026-02 — Most new reports (64)

Derived by counting each matching issue from its creation date until it closed. First-party computation over the anthropics/claude-code tracker — the trend is not published anywhere upstream.

Which builds report this

150 of these reports name the Claude Code build they were running, spanning 83 releases. Heaviest reporters:

Report volume, not a defect count: an issue can mention a build without that build having caused the failure. Versions come from the version string in the bug-report template, matched against real published tags.

Do these get fixed?

Median time to close is 18 days across 348 closures. Of the 348 closures with a recorded reason, 18% were closed as completed and 285 as not-planned or duplicate. The most recent completed fix landed in 2026-08.

Workarounds reported by the community

98 of these issues post a workaround someone says worked. The highest-engagement ones:

[BUG] Error during compaction
+1 a workaround is to copy the conversation and remove all the pasted user messages manually, then paste it into a new session
Found in the thread of #7530 · resolved
[BUG] Conversation compaction intermittently corrupts conversation state: “Compaction failed unexpectedly” and silent prompt submission failures
…h still persists at the time of writing this. One temporary workaround is to create a new chat within the same project, and to tell Claude to reference the other chat, while continuing in the new one. Of course, the new…
Found in the thread of #18482 · resolved
[BUG] Error: Error during compaction: API Error: Usage credits required for 1M context · turn on usage credits at claude.ai/settings/usage, or use --model to switch to standard context
…runs /clear. This is a new behavior as of a day or so ago. Workaround Running /clear restores the session. The error message suggests using --model to switch to standard context, but this requires hardcoding a model nam…
Found in the description of #63896 · still open
/compact fails with 'Conversation too long' when context limit is reached
…is full, but it fails precisely in that situation. The only workaround is , which destroys all session context including task progress. This happens consistently across sessions and projects. Additional Context The "Pres…
Found in the description of #23047 · resolved
Both /compact command and auto-compaction broken - 'conversation too long' error
…firms auto-compaction is also broken , making the suggested workaround ineffective. Impact Without working compaction (manual or automatic), users must manually manage sessions by starting new ones, losing conversation c…
Found in the description of #18211 · resolved

Excerpts are quoted from the linked issue so you can judge relevance before opening it. Threads that only ask for a workaround, or report that there is none, are excluded. These are community suggestions, not official guidance from Anthropic — read the full thread before applying one.

Matching issues 201–300

Ranked by community engagement (reactions weighted over comments). Listing the top 300 of 379 matches; the statistics above cover all 379.

Related aggregations

  1. Claude usage limit reached

    173 issues

  2. OAuth token expired / refresh failed

    344 issues

  3. Prompt is too long (context window exceeded)

    322 issues

  4. Invalid API key (invalid x-api-key)

    99 issues

  5. Your credit balance is too low

    76 issues

  6. API Error 400 (invalid_request_error)

    2,591 issues