With that, we have the base usage left and obviously you can open it, you
can type a prompt, I know. But there's a bit more to that.
For one, it's worth noting that there are many slash commands
by simply typing slash and then some command.
And these change over time. New ones are added, some are deprecated.
One important one, for example, is the clear command, which I just ran,
run again. The clear command simply clears the
and, important, the context window related to the session
can start a new clean session. Of course, that session and the
AI running in there won't know anything about the previous one, but you typically
want that when you clear a session.
You want to free up the context memory and start fresh.
This can, for example, also be helpful if the AI agent got stuck and
can't figure out or fix a problem or if you're simply working on a different
problem. Obviously, you can also just start a new session by
a new terminal window and starting Claude in there too.
You can have multiple Claude code sessions run in parallel.
You can work on the same project with multiple Claude code sessions.
You just wanna steer it such that the agents don't work against each
other in the same file, for example. But hey, that's why you're a developer.
You can control what you're doing with those AI assistants.
Now, there are many other useful tools in there
For example, context tells you how the
context window for this session is currently being used or
occupied. And since I just cleared it, it's almost
empty. Well, kind of. Interestingly enough,
20,000 of the 200,000 tokens that are available for
Claude Code Opus, the model I'm using here
already occupied by default. And you see that a part
of that is the system prompt that was set up by the Claude Code engineers
and Anthropic. A decent chunk is occupied by system
tools, so tool descriptions that are exposed to Claude
Code to give it some hints on when to use which tool, and
we'll get back to that. Some small part is
occupied by MCP tools because I already added some MCP servers, but
I'll also get back to that. And, well, you see the distribution, but you
also see there's a lot of free space.
Also interesting is this auto compact buffer, and we'll get back to
compaction. But in the end, it's there to ensure that
limits of the context window for your session, Claude
Code will automatically compact it by generating a summary
of the work that was done and the work that still needs to be done
it can throw away all the old context and
just keep that summary, that compaction summary, and continue
based on that. And since that compaction, generating that
summary requires some tokens too, there is
this reserved auto compact buffer which you can't use,
which is always reserved. Also interesting is the slash
usage tab which shows you your remaining
usage per your Claude Code plan
so that you can see how hard you can go on Claude Code or if
you should maybe decelerate and write more code from
hand again, or maybe pay extra for the extra
usage.