3.4 — Managing Context Limits and Memory: Restart, Summarise, Persist

CCAO-F Domain 3 · Task 3.4

What You Need to Know

A conversation holds a finite working space. When it reaches its length limit, start a new conversation or use a Project. Treat a long chat like a long meeting: know it will end, and decide what must survive it.

The Three Moves

1. Restart — when work is done, when the chat holds dead ends and superseded drafts, or when it nears its limits. A clean start with exactly the right context beats a marathon chat.
2. Summarise — have Claude summarise decisions, current state and what remains. Verify it yourself against source records (the summary inherits every uncorrected error). The verified summary becomes the new chat’s opening brief.
3. Persist — paste, re-attach, or store in Project knowledge any specific working output the next conversation will need. A standing document that keeps being revised and shared has a fourth home: an artifact.

What Memory Carries, and What It Does Not

Memory is a set of individual topics: your role, projects, communication preferences, ongoing work context. It is context about you, not transcripts, drafts or attached documents. Each Project has its own memory. Memory does not reliably transport an approved outline or a data file into the next chat. Explicit persistence remains the dependable pattern for a specific working output.

Key Concept: “A new conversation would lose all our context” is the continuity illusion. A verified summary and persisted documents carry forward the context worth keeping, at a fraction of the length and the usage.

Exam Traps

• Relying on memory or chat search to carry a specific working output into a new chat
• Pasting an unverified summary into the new conversation as the efficient handover
• Keeping everything in one enormous chat because a restart would lose the context