🤌 I was 45 minutes into a Claude Code session when Claude just — started making stuff up.
Default values I never asked for. Constraints I'd set an hour earlier? Completely ignored. Like talking to someone who totally forgot the entire conversation.
So I did what felt natural. I started correcting it in the session. More instructions. More constraints. Spelling things out AGAIN from scratch.
This made everything insanely worse.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about context windows — every correction you make goes into the same context window that's already broken.
Think of your context window like SpongeBob. When he's fresh, he absorbs everything perfectly. But once he's soaked in dirty water — failed attempts, stale instructions, frustrated corrections — squeezing him harder doesn't clean him. You're just pushing the same dirty water around.
At that point your context window is basically SpongeBob rolling around in the mud singing "I'm a dirty boy."
It's a death spiral. And most people don't realize they're in one until they've burned 30 minutes arguing with an AI that stopped listening 20 minutes ago.
This is even more important now with Claude's usage limits. Every correction that makes things worse is burning through your session cap faster — and once you're out, you're out.
So here's a hard rule — stop adding once you notice the session has gone off course. Start terminating.
/clear wipes your conversation history but keeps the project context. Or just open a brand new terminal window entirely. Throw dirty SpongeBob away and grab a fresh sparkly clean one.
Claude will immediately go back to being the brilliant product that it is.
I do this like — a hundred times a day. The moment something starts to feel off, I don't investigate. I don't argue. I just end the session and start over. If I really need context from the old session, I'll ask Claude to summarize it and copy paste the important parts into the new one after reviewing.
Running /compact when things have already gone wrong is usually not the move — you're basically just squeezing a dirty sponge and re-dipping it in dirty water. You freed up space but the residue of bad context is still baked in.
Fresh sessions will produce better code in 3 minutes than 30 minutes of arguing will.
Stop squeezing dirty SpongeBob. Grab a fresh one. 🧛
Related: You're Wasting Your Best Engineering Skill → — the longer take on curating context strategically before Claude starts hallucinating in the first place.
