Why Claude Code started compacting your idle chats

Claude Code v2.1.299 (Oct 14, 2026) documents idle compaction for long terminal sessions: after roughly 54 minutes idle on chats above ~200K tokens, the session can compact before the hour-long prompt cache expires (release tag v2.1.299). Independent weeklies picked it up the same day (e.g. DevAgentRadar brief (Oct 15, 2026)).

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