Strategic Compact Skill

Suggests manual /compact at strategic points in your workflow rather than relying on arbitrary auto-compaction.

Why Strategic Compaction?

Auto-compaction triggers at arbitrary points:

• Often mid-task, losing important context
• No awareness of logical task boundaries
• Can interrupt complex multi-step operations

Strategic compaction at logical boundaries:

• After exploration, before execution - Compact research context, keep implementation plan
• After completing a milestone - Fresh start for next phase
• Before major context shifts - Clear exploration context before different task

What Claude should do when this skill loads

1. At phase boundaries (plan finalized, milestone complete, bug fixed, long exploration finished), suggest the user run /compact — briefly, with the reason.
2. When the PostToolUse hook below injects a [strategic-compact] reminder, treat it as a prompt to evaluate whether the current moment is a logical boundary; only suggest /compact if it is. Never suggest it mid-implementation.
3. Remind the user that durable state survives compaction: .claude/idev/smart-context/index.json, .claude/idev/project-map/project.map.md, and the other .claude/idev/ caches.

How the hook works

suggest-compact.sh (Unix) / suggest-compact.ps1 (Windows) run on PostToolUse with matcher Edit|Write:

1. Read the hook JSON from stdin and extract session_id
2. Increment a per-session counter file in the temp directory
3. Every N calls (default 50), emit hookSpecificOutput JSON on stdout, which Claude Code injects as additional context for Claude

Hook Setup

The hook is pre-registered by the plugin's hooks/hooks.json (PostToolUse, matcher Edit|Write) but off by default — the script exits instantly unless the per-project opt-in flag exists. Enable it with:

/idev:hooks enable compact

which creates <project>/.claude/idev/compact-suggestions-enabled. Disable with /idev:hooks disable compact. No settings.json editing, takes effect immediately.

Add to ~/.claude/settings.json — NOTE: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} is NOT expanded in user settings; use the absolute plugin path. The matcher is a regex over tool names, not an expression language:

{
  "hooks": {
    "PostToolUse": [{
      "matcher": "Edit|Write",
      "hooks": [{
        "type": "command",
        "command": "bash \"<idev-plugin-root>/skills/strategic-compact/suggest-compact.sh\""
      }]
    }]
  }
}

(Windows: powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "<idev-plugin-root>\\skills\\strategic-compact\\suggest-compact.ps1".) The opt-in flag file is still required either way.

Configuration

• IDEV_COMPACT_THRESHOLD - Edit/Write calls between suggestions (default: 50)

Best Practices

1. Compact after planning - Once plan is finalized, compact to start fresh
2. Compact after debugging - Clear error-resolution context before continuing
3. Don't compact mid-implementation - Preserve context for related changes
4. The hook tells you when, you decide if

Related

• smart-context skill - For context that persists across compaction
• project-map skill - The map survives compaction at .claude/idev/project-map/project.map.md