Under the hoodTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
0Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
CompactionArea: what it touches
Internal ChangesKind: in v2.1.287,
Internal ChangesSection of the release
What
Compaction is when Claude Code shortens a long conversation so it fits within the model's limit. There are two failure messages for it: one for when the conversation could not be reduced below the limit, and one for when attached media is too large. These messages are now built from stored text rather than written directly where the error is raised. They previously read "Compaction failed · conversation could not be reduced below the context limit" and "Compaction failed · attached media exceeds size limits".
Why
The wording you see when compaction fails could differ from 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 doubtThe new wording of the two messages is not known.
