Chat messages disappear at low context usage (~5%)

Description

During a conversation with Claude Code, earlier messages in the chat became invisible/inaccessible despite context usage being only ~5%. The user could not scroll back to see prior messages.

This suggests context compression is triggering far too early, or messages are being dropped for a different reason.

Steps to reproduce

1. Start a Claude Code session
2. Have a multi-turn conversation (in this case, ~10-15 turns involving file reads, agent dispatches, and file writes)
3. Observe that earlier messages in the conversation are no longer visible
4. Check context usage — reported at ~5%

Expected behavior

Messages should remain visible and accessible until context usage approaches the compression threshold (which should be well above 5%).

Actual behavior

Earlier messages disappear mid-session despite very low context usage.

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.1.89
• OS: Linux (WSL2) 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2
• Model: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code