Compacting during workflow

[MawJPhysics]

Can I please confirm that during a workflow i.e. /orchestrate feature. I want to know if I should compact manually doing the workflow or if it's automatically handled? Because the workflow is chained together automatically, I don't know if there's an opportunity for me to insert a compacting to save context.

[MawJPhysics]

I think i might see the answer, you have to manually "install" the suggest-compact skill into settings.json, it's not automatically enabled

[pangerlkr]

Great question! You're exactly right. Here's the complete breakdown:

During /orchestrate workflows, context compacting is NOT automatic. You need to explicitly enable it by:

1. Installing the suggest-compact skill into your settings.json
2. Activating it as a workflow step between orchestration steps when you need to preserve context

Why it's manual:

• Workflows in Claude Code are deterministic by nature—they're designed to chain operations efficiently
• Not every workflow needs compacting (depends on context length and model limits)
• Automatic compacting could introduce latency and unexpected context loss

Best practice:
Add the suggest-compact skill strategically:

• After complex multi-step operations that accumulate tokens
• Before token-heavy operations like large file processing
• At workflow checkpoints where you want to save context state

This gives you fine-grained control over context management within your orchestrated workflows.

Feel free to share your workflow configuration if you need specific guidance on placement!