FRESH: A Meter That Tells You When to Start a New Claude Chat
Every message you send makes Claude re-read your whole chat, and long chats get worse answers. This free meter sits at the bottom of Claude Code, stays green while you are fine, and turns red when it is time for a fresh chat. One prompt to paste, the exact steps, and the catch
Why you should care
- Claude does not remember your chat the way you do. Every time you send a message, Claude Code sends the whole conversation again. Anthropic's costs page says so: it sends your full conversation with every request.
- That is why a one-line question in a chat that has been open all day still uses your limit for the whole chat.
- Long chats also get worse answers. Anthropic calls it context rot: as the amount of text in a chat grows, accuracy and recall degrade.
- A fresh chat is free. The costs page says /clear costs nothing.
The problem is you cannot see any of this happening. So this guide gives you a meter. It sits at the bottom of Claude Code. Green means keep going. Red means start a fresh chat. Claude Code builds it for you from one sentence, and there is nothing to install.
The prompt
Open Claude Code and paste this. Claude Code has a built-in command called /statusline. You tell it in plain English what you want, and it writes the script and the settings for you.
/statusline show a meter of how full my context is: a bar with the percent, green under 70 percent, red at 70 percent or more with the words "start a fresh chat"
- Paste the line above into Claude Code and press Enter.
- Let Claude Code write the script, and say yes when it asks to save it.
- Send one more message and look at the bottom of Claude Code. The meter is there.
Free, for your email
Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (4 more sections, 2 copy-paste prompts) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
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