Claude Code Context Window Rot: Why Sessions Get Dumber (And How to Fix It)

You know the pattern. You open a fresh Claude Code session, paste in the task, and the first few responses are sharp. Claude reads the right files, makes sensible decisions, and follows your architecture conventions. Then - somewhere around the 45-minute mark - things start to drift. It asks about a file path that it read twenty minutes ago. It contradicts an architectural decision you both agreed on earlier in the session. It proposes a refactor that undoes work it just finished. The responses