Cascading failure: auto-compaction, /compact, and rewind all fail at context limit — requires Ctrl+C to escape

Description

When a conversation hits the context limit, a cascading series of failures occurs with no graceful recovery:

1. Auto-compaction triggers when context limit is reached, but errors out:

``
Error: Error during compaction: Error: Conversation too long. Press esc twice to go up a few messages and try again.
``

1. Manual /compact also fails with the same error — despite being the suggested remedy for hitting the context limit.

1. Rewind is offered as a fallback, but that also fails:

``
Error: Failed to summarize:
Error: Conversation too long. Press esc twice to go up a few messages and try again.
``

1. Session becomes unresponsive after the rewind error — the only way to escape was Ctrl+C to kill the process. No further input was accepted.

Screenshot

!Screenshot showing the cascading errors

(See description above for the full error sequence)

Impact

Complete loss of session context and any in-progress work state. The user is forced to hard-kill the process and start fresh with /clear or a new session.

Expected Behavior

• Compaction (auto or manual) should handle conversations at the context limit — that's its primary purpose
• If compaction fails, the session should remain interactive (not hang)
• There should always be a graceful exit path that doesn't require Ctrl+C

Environment

• Claude Code CLI
• Model: claude-opus-4-6
• macOS (Darwin 25.1.0)