Understand context decay, the alignment tax, and when to override Claude Code—so you stay in control of output quality as sessions grow long.
You learn why output quality erodes as Claude Code sessions grow long, and you separate context decay, instruction drift, and the alignment tax—three distinct failure modes that experts routinely conflate.
It is hour three of a refactor. The session has been productive—nine files touched, tests passing, a clean diff so far. You fold everything into one routine you can run without rereading a thing.
You can open a session from two weeks ago beside one from this morning—same codebase, same model, same prompt—and see why the older transcript is sometimes sharper: cleaner refactors, fewer invented function names, fewer confident citations to files that do not exist.
You settle the decisions early—the API client lives in lib/http, all dates are UTC, no new dependencies without asking—and you catch the drift when Claude later proposes a fetch wrapper in utils/, formats a timestamp in local time, and quietly adds a date library to package.json.
You recognize when a refactor that started clean—a clear plan, a tight CLAUDE.md, acceptance criteria the model could check against—has simply run too long.
You verify whether the assertion is actually true. Without that step, every lifecycle discipline in the book just produces confidently-stated output faster.
Look back at your three most recent "Claude got worse" moments. For each, answer in writing: what the model did wrong, the session age at failure in turns or rough duration, and whether a clean restart fixed it.
Trace a real sequence while refactoring an authentication module across a long session. At turn 3 you instruct that all new public functions need JSDoc with @throws tags, and Claude adds them perfectly—the rule has high weight, recent and uncontested. By turn 22, a summarization event fires as context fills.
Decay is predictable enough to forecast. Three conditions raise the probability sharply, and you can read all three off your own session state—starting with token pressure: the closer you are to a summarization event, the more aggressively reasoning gets compressed.
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