My observations on Claude's idle compaction

TL;DR I’ve wanted Claude Code to compact my conversations in the background for a long time. It now compacts a long session when I walk away from it for about an hour. My Claude went through my session logs: before idle compaction, I spent around 160 minutes over four months waiting on compactions. Since it arrived on my account on 10 October, I haven’t waited on one. Motivation Link to heading My sessions run long. Once a conversation fills the context window, Claude Code stops, summarises everything, and carries on from the summary. In my logs that pause took a median of 111 seconds, with one in ten over two minutes. I kept wishing the summary could happen in the background.