Developer drops context-shrinking for Claude Code, clears per task

The developer's shift came after noticing that even a single small request could balloon context, because recent Sonnet versions investigate related code, implement, verify, and test in one go. Splitting tasks further to save context meant interrupting that flow and re-explaining the situation in a new session, which he judged worse for keeping the reasoning behind implementation decisions intact.

His current setup separates concerns by session rather than by context size: Sonnet carries a task from request through testing in the main session, Opus reviews in a separate session to avoid being anchored by the implementation conversation, and fixes go back to the original Sonnet session until review passes. Only then does he run /clear. He explicitly notes this is his own judgment, not a quantitative comparison of quality, and that manual /compact is not something he has found necessary in his style of work.