Tag: context-window

A skill's body loads on demand, but its name and description sit in a listing that is always in the prompt, capped at 1% of the context window. Claude Code 2.1.261 adds /skill-doctor to say which loaded skills never get used and what each one costs, so you can prune them before the budget starts evicting the skills you do use.

A named subagent starts cold, a fork inherits your whole conversation and shares your prompt cache, and a background agent is a second Claude Code session entirely. The trap is the naming: /fork stopped being the in-session fork at v2.1.212 and /subtask took over.

Claude Code compacts, then a single oversized file read or tool result immediately refills the window and it compacts again. Drop the item with /clear, read files in slices, and force big output to disk.

High memory usage and context overflow are two different problems in Claude Code. Raise the Node heap for RAM, use /context and /compact for the window, /heapdump to diagnose.