What
When Claude Code compacts (summarizes) a long conversation to free up context space, it now has two additional summary templates beyond the original full-history one:
- one for summarizing only the recent portion of a conversation, when the earlier context is being kept intact and doesn't need re-summarizing
- one for summarizing a section of conversation that will be followed by more messages Claude hasn't seen yet, which now includes a "Context for Continuing Work" section instead of the old "Optional Next Step" section
Why
This lets compaction summarize just the part of a conversation that actually needs it, rather than always re-summarizing everything, which should produce more accurate and relevant summaries when only part of the history needs compacting.