Fresh Context Is Your Best Context
Start new sessions per task, not per day. Performance degrades as context grows — Claude starts forgetting earlier decisions, repeating itself, and losing track of the goal.
One task, one session. Finish, hand off, start clean.
The Handoff Pattern
Before ending a session, write a HANDOFF.md with everything the next agent needs:
Feed the path to the next agent as the first message: "Read HANDOFF.md and continue from where the last session left off."
Plan Mode Handoff
A lighter-weight alternative when you don’t need a full HANDOFF.md (see the official interactive mode docs for all session commands):
- Enter plan mode with
/plan or Shift+Tab
- Ask Claude to gather everything the next agent needs — decisions made, files changed, what’s left
- Select Option 1: “Yes, clear context and auto-accept edits”
- The new session starts clean with only the plan as context
This is faster than writing a HANDOFF.md manually but gives you less control over what carries forward.
Forking
When you want to explore a branch without losing your current session:
- Mid-conversation:
/fork creates a copy of the current session you can take in a different direction
- From terminal:
claude --fork-session with --resume or --continue to branch from a previous session
Useful for: “What if we tried approach B instead?” without abandoning approach A.
When to Compact vs. When to Start Fresh
Handoff skill — For a structured handoff workflow, install the handoff skill: npx skills add ykdojo/claude-code-tips@handoff
