You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
3Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
2Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
CompactionArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.269,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
Claude Code periodically compacts (summarizes) old conversation history to save space. When its usual round-based compaction options are exhausted, instead of summarizing the entire conversation history as a last resort, it now splits off a trailing block of the most recent messages to keep as-is, and only summarizes what came before that.
Why
This keeps your most recent messages intact even in the last-resort compaction case, so recent context isn't lost to summarization along with everything else.
