Glossary · term48 of 202
compaction
A billed request that reads an entire conversation history and replaces it with a shorter summary. The read itself counts as full input tokens, so compacting often costs more upfront than it saves unless the summary gets reused many times.
also written as compaction call · compaction iteration
Related terms
/clearA Claude Code command that discards the current session's context entirely, used to start a fresh window after repeated corrections have polluted the old one.view termbilled iterationOne individually charged request within a multi-step agent run, including hidden steps like compaction, that top-level usage summaries can omit entirely.view termprompt cachingA billing mechanism where a stable, byte-identical prompt prefix gets reused across turns at a fraction of normal input cost, while any edit to that prefix forces a full-price rewrite.view term
At a glance
- cited by
- 4 posts
- categories
- 2
- first used
- apr 2026
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