The 60% rule to compact your context:

Don't let your sessions go above 60% in context utilization. After that, your model will start feeling drunk and you'll risk Claude Code to trigger auto-compact for you.

Auto-compact is not good if you want control on what context stays and what goes.

Instead:

• Run /statusline to permanently display context % • When > 60%, run /compact with instructions on what to keep • For even more control, dump session context to a file and edit it

Many people don't know this:

You can run /compact with a prompt explaining what you want to keep. For example:

"/compact Keep the project description and change instructions"

This will anchor Claude Code's summary around those topics and will compress everything else more aggressively.