subagentcontext

Context editing (sometimes called compaction) is the general practice of programmatically trimming, summarizing, or removing older or less-relevant content from a conversation's context so that a long-running session can continue without exceeding the context window.

A common approach: once context usage crosses a threshold, older tool results or conversation turns are summarized into a shorter form (or dropped entirely if no longer relevant) and replaced in place, freeing budget for new turns while preserving the gist of what came before.

General mechanism description; no single canonical Anthropic doc for this exact term was cited verbatim this session, so this row is phrased generally rather than quoting a specific API field or parameter name.

created 2026-07-02 08:27:09 · JSON