Auto-compact to avoid "input length and max_tokens exceed context limit" errors

[achieveramin]

Bug Description
it raised:   ⎿  API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"input length and max_tokens exceed context limit: 187254 + 20000 > 204798, decrease input length or max_tokens and try again"}} then it stopped continuing

Environment Info

• Platform: macos
• Terminal: iTerm.app
• Version: 0.2.9
• Feedback ID: a0322a15-98fc-4ebc-a3bf-64eb8d45da87

[sid374]

You can use /compact to reduce the context size. Let us know if that doesn't work!

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview#reduce-token-usage

[djrodgerspryor]

I got into an annoying case today where /compact itself ran into the max_tokens error and I had to start again. It would be awesome to:

• Keep enough reserved tokens that this can't happen (ie. that compact can always succeed)
  and/or
• Auto-compact when crossing a certain threshold (eg. 70% usage). Maybe this needs some more care to preserve the last few commands so that it's really seamless. Ideally users wouldn't have to think about the context limit except for knowing vaguely that claude has probably forgotten about older context.

Another interesting approach for continuous-compaction would be to chunk up the whole transcript into well named/structured files as the session goes on and have claude search through them and read relevant ones as it does with code files. That way, if it knows it needs to refer back to something from an hour ago, it could look back through the log and find the right file to read to re-absorb the content.

[IAMtheIAM]

I can't run /compact

 /compact 
  ⎿  Error: API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"input 
     length and `max_tokens` exceed context limit: 197170 + 20000 > 204648, decrease input length or 
     `max_tokens` and try again"}}

[stanleyluong]

same problem. need to ctrl+C out of claude to start over whch is annoying.

[Tom910]

yeah, the same I can't run /compat because the command exceed limits

[greendesertsnow]

I can't /compact in Cline or Roo...