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 v2.1.314,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
Compaction is how Claude Code shrinks a long conversation by asking the model to summarize it. When that summary request is itself too large, Claude Code falls back to a last-resort step. Before, this step only cut text from the start of the conversation, up to a fixed number of times.
The last-resort step now works in stages:
If it cannot tell how far over the size limit the request is, it retries with tool results, images and documents left out.
If the request is still refused for size without images or documents, it cuts the text and retries.
It can also carry messages you typed while Claude was busy into the summary request, so they are not lost.
Why
Very large conversations are more likely to compact successfully instead of failing, so you can keep working in the same session.
