Memory Loss: Compaction Message Lost Dropped During Ongoing Interaction
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — sid374
Activity 5 comments · opened Mar 29, 2025 · closed Apr 1, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (sid374, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Claude auto-compacted my session when we ran out of context. But we were mid-process. So I lost the compaction message as Claude kept going. When I asked Claude to re-print it, he had no memory of it. He claimed we hadn't compacted our session. I paid for that compaction and it's useful context, so that's costing me in both ways. I'd like Claude to have a way of retaining and reprinting his compactions to aid in memory going forward, but at the very least for my own records. I've been adding the compactions to project memory.
- OS: macOS Sequoia
- Claude Code Version: 0.2.54
5 Comments
@jaredscheib if you scroll to the top of the conversation you should see the compaction summary as the first message in your post-compacted conversation. Are you not seeing this?
That's normally what happens, and maybe it's my shell (zsh), but immediately Claude continues on its process and read a bunch of files and suggested some code such that I could no longer scroll up high enough – I hit a ceiling of scrolling back into history due to length of output.
Either way, I'd like to have easy access to my history of compactions since they're helpful as context over time, and frankly to see a history of all messages and work (esp. since I am paying for it).
And I'd expect Claude to be able to refer back to a history of compactions and other messages as well, akin to a git log. All iterations, proposals, and dialog would be considered part of a history that I'd want to access and refer to myself and via Claude
Thanks.
Thanks for the clarification. Claude continuing to proceed with it's task after auto-compact is expected behavior, but I hear you about keeping the summary alive for later use. This feature request is in the same vein and we'll track this going forward: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/667
Thanks. Final compaction of my request, is for me and Claude to have access to and be able to refer to the history of compactions :) This is in the same vein as the linked ticket, but that ticket alone wouldn't quite fulfill this hope.
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