Claude Code sessions that run too long silently degrade in quality, cost, and speed. Context management is the difference between productive multi-hour workflows and expensive, unreliable babysitting. Most developers working with Claude Code through the CLI or VS Code don't monitor their context window until outputs start contradicting earlier decisions or hallucinating file paths that don't exist. This article provides a systematic framework for diagnosing, preventing, and recovering from context saturation, drawing on the specific mechanisms Claude Code exposes for controlling session state.…