Baoyu Questions Whether Claude Code’s Compaction Differs From a New Session

What happened

Baoyu says that, if he understands correctly, Claude Code continues a task after compaction by retrieving useful information from the past conversation as needed. He asks how that differs from starting a new session and loading useful information from the old one, arguing that the only difference is a small amount of summary text and therefore not many extra tokens.

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The story so far

Baoyu questioned whether Claude Code’s compaction meaningfully differs from starting a new session and loading useful information from the previous conversation. He said his understanding was that Claude Code continues a task after compaction by retrieving relevant information from the earlier conversation as needed. On that interpretation, Baoyu argued, the only difference is a small amount of summary text, which he said would add few tokens.