Context Is Everything!
For much of 2025 this was my experience of agentic gen/AI coding:
Start a task, Claude Code takes a while to warm up until it hits a sweet spot where it reliably produces consistent, good work for many turns, and then, blammo!, context collapse. At which point my only options are
/clearor/compact. Arg!
Context Collapse
We know from the NoLiMa paper that longer contexts become diffuse which result in the haystack problem: earlier signals that lack lexicographical matching get buried in the mass of tokens. At some point the agent starts to go haywire — often when we're near the context window limit. This is super frustrating because it comes without warning and interrupts flow. Once this happens, I find that /clear is the only workable option. I wanted a better option than to simply start over.
Introducing Context-Curator
https://github.com/0x6a77/context-curator
Context-curator is a set of Claude Code slash commands that allow you to manage context in a task-oriented way. (You can read below how context-curator came to exist.) The general idea is that context, which includes the CLAUDE.md files, really should be task-specific so that Claude Code laser focuses on just what's needed for the task.
Now I can warm up a context and save it as part of a task, and when I encounter context collapse, I just reload the warmed-up context. Or when I return to a task, I get the warmed-up context. (If we reload a context within the cache window, we'll save tokens. This will usually be true for /resume after a collapsed context.)