Compact Guard

Protect important context through compaction cycles. Based on Claude Code internals: compaction restores max 5 files with 5K tokens each, within a 50K total budget.

Trigger

Use before /compact or when auto-compact warning appears.

Key Constants (from Claude Code source)

• POST_COMPACT_MAX_FILES_TO_RESTORE = 5 — only 5 files survive
• POST_COMPACT_TOKEN_BUDGET = 50K — total restore budget
• POST_COMPACT_MAX_TOKENS_PER_FILE = 5K — per-file limit
• Auto-compact fires at context_window - 13K buffer

Pre-Compact Checklist

Before compacting, save these to memory or a scratch file: