I was under the impression a compact resurrected the session anyway so it is not a good idea on a cold session. Is that true or is it actually cheaper?
Yes, it's better to compact before it gets out of cache. I think new versions of Claude Code can do that automatically. It can be cheaper if you switch to Haiku or something
You are correct, the first turn costs about the same either way, the difference comes after. Without compacting, every later turn re-reads the non-compacted context, and after compacting it reads a short summary.
So it only pays off if the session goes on. In my own dogfooding tests, I compacted 47 times out of 50 it had suggested.
This is a cool idea but I think humans assume more than 14MB of intelligence. This is like the unhelpful guard in the swamp castle of Monty Python's Holy Grail
Haha, its not a generalist model, cheap devices cannot run LLM in production, so we brig on-device intelligence to them in the size they can. Needle is niche, not a Gemma or GPT replacement.
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