Memory management in Claude Code: Context Pipeline

If you are building an AI agent that needs to survive longer sessions, context management becomes a systems problem very quickly. At first, the implementation looks simple. You append messages, keep tool outputs around, maybe summarize occasionally, and keep going. But once the session becomes longer, the same problems start showing up: prompts get too large, tool outputs dominate the context, cache reuse drops, and retries start making the situation worse. That is why Claude Code’s memory desig