Claude Code users report 200K context rollbacks and deleted session files

• looselyhuman's Reddit post says some Claude Code users were quietly running Sonnet at a 600K context window, then got pushed back to 200K, which broke multi-day workflows built around richer compaction and handoff state.
• Boris Cherny's auto mode tip pushed auto mode as the key to running parallel Claude Code sessions, but Matt Pocock's reply says the same setting breaks human-in-the-loop checkpoints inside skills.
• According to nptacek's repost and jeffscottward's repost, Claude Code deletes session files by default after they are imported, which makes recovery and auditability worse when long sessions go sideways.
• the long-session Reddit thread lists narration drift, hook friction, context rot, voice degradation, and checkpoint amnesia as recurring failure modes in 6 hour plus runs, which lines up with koltregaskes's quota complaint about shrinking limits and slower session handling.
• ClaudeCodeLog's 2.1.149 changelog post shows Anthropic is still patching the harness quickly, including a PowerShell permission bypass, macOS find crashes, frozen transcript view, and better /feedback reports that now include pre-compaction conversation history.

You can read Anthropic's permission mode docs, the official 2.1.149 changelog, and the two Reddit threads on context rollback and long-session failure modes. The weirdest detail is that looselyhuman's follow-up comment tied the 600K setting to a Growthbook block in .claude.json, while ClaudeCodeLog's changelog summary shows Anthropic simultaneously shipping more instrumentation around usage, compaction-era bug reports, and MCP cost accounting.

Anthropic expanded auto mode to the Pro plan and added Sonnet 4.6 support in its permission mode docs, with ClaudeDevs' update post framing it as a faster way to eliminate permission prompts.

Boris Cherny, Claude Code lead at Anthropic, went further: Cherny's post calls auto mode the building block for "multi-clauding," where one session runs while you work in another.

That same shortcut has a clear tradeoff in the field. In Matt Pocock's reply, Pocock says auto mode "screws up all HITL checkpoints in skills," which turns a promoted convenience feature into a workflow break for teams using approval gates inside custom skills.

The sharpest new complaint is not about raw model quality. It is about invisible configuration changes underneath long-running harnesses.

In looselyhuman's Reddit post, a Claude Code user says Sonnet sessions had been running at 600K context for weeks, then reverted to 200K without warning. The post describes a workflow built around named agent teams, enriched compaction summaries, cross-context notes, and summaries that had grown to 35K tokens on their own.

The follow-up comment in that same thread says a Growthbook section in .claude.json briefly showed a 600000 value, then reverted to 200000 on login and before prompts, according to the Reddit thread. That is still an attributed user report, not an Anthropic explanation, but it is more specific than a generic "the model got worse" complaint.

This also fits a broader pattern. In the long-session Reddit thread, one user says long autonomous runs decay through five stages:

1. Narration drift, where the agent talks about plans instead of calling tools.
2. Hook friction, where safety hooks start blocking legitimate work.
3. Context rot, where it re-checks files and re-runs already-passed tests.
4. Voice degradation, where public-facing writing gets more robotic over time.
5. Checkpoint amnesia, where compaction or restarts erase learned state unless it was written to disk.

Two reposts made a small but nasty default much more visible: Claude Code deletes session files after import.

Neither repost includes the original full explainer in the evidence bundle, so the safest claim here is the narrow one both posts make: imported session files are deleted by default. That matters in the context of the 600K to 200K rollback report and the checkpoint amnesia thread, because the fallback artifact you might expect to recover from is not necessarily still there.

Separate user reports point in the same direction. koltregaskes says tokens are shrinking, desktop sessions load slowly, and moving between sessions breaks flow; itsclivetime's comparison post says the app forgets typed text when switching conversations and remote control disconnects often enough to be "basically unusable."

Anthropic's shipping velocity shows up most clearly in the official 2.1.149 changelog, which ClaudeCodeLog's summary unpacked less than a day after 2.1.148.

The notable fixes are a mix of security, stability, and observability:

• PowerShell cd forms no longer bypass workspace boundaries, per ClaudeCodeLog's changelog summary.
• A sandbox write allowlist bug in git worktrees no longer covered the main repo root, according to the detailed changelog post.
• Bash find no longer exhausts the macOS file and vnode table on large trees, per the release summary.
• /usage now breaks down limit usage by skills, subagents, plugins, and MCP server, according to the release summary.
• /feedback now includes conversation from before context compaction, which the detailed changelog post says should make earlier long-session failures easier to triage.

That last change is new information about how Anthropic is instrumenting the same class of failures users are complaining about. The company has not publicly addressed the 600K to 200K rollback reports in this evidence set, but it is clearly patching around compaction loss, permission edge cases, and cost visibility at the harness level.