When to Start Fresh: Managing AI Coding Sessions

You've been in the same conversation for two hours. Early on, Claude Code was sharp: it caught bugs you missed, suggested better patterns, and asked clarifying questions. Now it's contradicting what it built an hour ago and missing obvious things. Your session is carrying too much history.

Every message in a conversation is part of Claude Code's working memory. Early in a session, all of it is about what you're doing right now. As the session grows, it fills up with things you've moved past: half-finished ideas you explored and dropped, tangents you followed and closed.

Claude Code can't tell 'this mattered earlier' from 'this matters now.' As the old material piles up, it crowds out the task in front of you, and Claude Code starts mixing up what it said before with what you're asking now.

This is expected: it's how language models work.