The model is usually so confused after a /compact I also prefer a /clear.
I set up my directives to maintain a work log for all work that I do. I instruct Claude Code to maintain a full log of the conversation, all commands executed including results, all failures as well as successes, all learnings and discoveries, as well as a plan/task list including details of what's next. When context is getting full, I do a /clear and start the new session by re-reading the work log and it is able to jump right back into action without confusion.
Work logs are great because the context becomes portable - you can share it between different tools or engineers and can persist the context for reuse later if needed.
The trick is to parametrize the /compact. Something like "/compact focus on the XZY, the next steps will be FOOBAR, and keep a high level summary of BARFOO"
That makes the compaction summary a lot more focused and useful.
I think both /compact and /clear are valuable / have their own use cases.
my small mental mode:
- really quick fix / need to go over board with context -> just /compact + continue pushing
- next phase -> ask for handover document or update worklog, and then send fresh one to new phase.
I wonder how many thousands of hours I have put into this wonderful collection. My kids play them too.
There's some jank relating to fractional scaling on Wayland unfortunately, but I keep one monitor without scaling so when I want to play I just launch the puzzles on that.
I generally find with Nix and NixOS that I'm able to just use a dev shell to create little custom environments at runtime as needed. Another option is `mkOutOfStoreSymlink` if you want some dynamic config for some GUI you are running.
Suppose your dev shell contains app Foo v1 which uses lib Bar v2. It links directly against the full nix store path. So loading a different version of lib Bar (say v3) into your dev shell, which puts it on your PATH, doesn't affect Foo - the Foo executable will still link against Bar v2. That's by design and a very good thing! It assures reproducibility and fixes the version incompatibility issue that dynamic linking typically suffers from.
However, what if I want to swap it out for whatever reason? Right now I have to modify the package definition and rebuild it. That's needlessly slow and resource intensive for some one off monkey patch. It also might not be feasible at all on my hardware - most people's rigs aren't cut out to build chromium or llvm, for example.
The UX is also absolutely terrible. Have you ever tried to patch a nixpkgs provided definition? I actually gave up on using nix as my primary build tool over this.
My expectation going in was a neat and tidy collection of independent, standalone package definitions that imported one another to satisfy dependencies as necessary. The reality was a massive monolith containing all packages at once making extracting just one to patch it rather complicated in some cases.
I believe flakes were supposed to address this exact dependency modification UX issue somewhat, but they caused my code to break in other ways and I decided I was done sinking time into tinkering with tooling rather than building software.
They say you shouldn't host status pages on the same infrastructure that it is monitoring, but in a way that makes it much more accurate and responsive in outages!
It seems really straightforward to suggest that the better way to solve this is with standard protocols and self-hosting, but I do realise that's quite hand wavy and often not very accessible.
SMTP is an example of this succeeding, as problematic as that protocol is.
ECS architectures are used in a number of young open source game engines, such as Bevy[1]. I haven't done game development for a long time, but hearing about an architecture that does away with the heavy and complex OOP you often see in games makes me want to dip my toes in again and check it out.
There's also a history in applying ECS in older things, it started taking off in early 2000's, it's been bread and butter (though not universal) for long now, also in some open source engines. See eg https://github.com/Adelost/entity-component-systems-study#re...
I set up my directives to maintain a work log for all work that I do. I instruct Claude Code to maintain a full log of the conversation, all commands executed including results, all failures as well as successes, all learnings and discoveries, as well as a plan/task list including details of what's next. When context is getting full, I do a /clear and start the new session by re-reading the work log and it is able to jump right back into action without confusion.
Work logs are great because the context becomes portable - you can share it between different tools or engineers and can persist the context for reuse later if needed.