Feature request: graceful performance degradation preferred over silent context compaction

The Problem

When a conversation approaches the context limit, Claude Code silently auto-compacts the conversation — summarizing earlier messages to make room. The user gets no warning, no prompt, no choice. Their working context is wiped without consent.

This happened to me mid-session while building a production application. I lost a multi-day conversation's worth of working context — exact code discussions, decision rationale, nuanced back-and-forth — with zero warning. I'm paying for this context window. Having it silently taken away is unacceptable.

What Should Happen Instead

Performance degradation should be preferred over compaction. Specifically:

1. Never auto-compact without explicit user consent. Ask the user: "Context is getting deep — do you want me to compact now, or keep going?" Wait for a yes.

1. If the user says no, degrade gracefully:

• Slower responses are acceptable
• Reduced tool parallelism is acceptable
• Shorter responses are acceptable
• Losing working context without consent is NOT acceptable

1. Give the user visibility into context usage. A simple indicator (percentage used, messages remaining, something) so they can make informed decisions about when to compact on their own terms.

1. If compaction is truly unavoidable (hard limit), warn with enough lead time for the user to run /compact themselves and control what gets preserved.

Why This Matters

• Users pay for context window capacity. Silent compaction removes what they paid for.
• For professional users building production software, the conversation context IS the working memory. It's not disposable.
• Trust in the tool requires predictable behavior. Silent data loss — even "just" conversation data — destroys trust.
• The user's context is their property. Wiping it without consent is a UX failure regardless of the technical justification.

Environment

• Claude Code CLI
• Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)
• Long multi-day session with heavy tool usage (hundreds of tool calls, large diffs)