Under the hoodTier: how much it should matter to you
2Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
3Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
CompactionArea: what it touches
Internal ChangesKind: in v2.1.283,
Internal ChangesSection of the release
What
Compaction is when Claude Code shortens a long conversation so it fits in the model's memory, called the context window. Sessions with a window of about a million tokens were exempt from some compaction and blocking checks. That exemption now also applies when the window size comes from an experiment and the model has no known standard size. Window sizes set through an environment variable or settings still never qualify.
Why
For accounts in a context window experiment, compaction or context limits may start at a different point than before.
How sure we are
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubtExactly which checks the exemption skips, and which experiment sets the window, is not known.
