Overview
Clearing a context removes useful conversational history. It works only when the workflow has externalized the important state into durable artifacts such as a product requirements document, issue files, code, tests, and commits.
Compaction is not useless. It can preserve a long-running discussion when restarting would be expensive. The limitation is that the compacted record becomes another interpretation layer, and repeated compaction can carry stale or distorted decisions forward.
A larger context window still has value for retrieval-heavy work. The mistake is treating advertised context capacity as an assurance that all tokens are equally useful for coding and reasoning.