After a long coding session, Claude Code is becoming slower and less accurate in its responses about the codebase. What is the best approach to improve performance while retaining useful project context?
Answer: Use /compact to summarize the conversation history and reduce context size
/compact instructs Claude Code to summarize the conversation history into a compact form, reducing context size while preserving the most relevant information about the project. Starting a new terminal session discards context entirely. Deleting session.json is destructive and loses all session data. /clear removes all context, which means Claude loses awareness of everything done so far in the session.