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Context Continuity & Instant Resume

Pillar: context-continuity | Date: April 2026
Scope: Head-to-head comparison of 2026 SOTA for sub-3s agent boot at full context: CLAUDE.md size/cost tradeoffs, Skills ROI analysis (which earn rent vs. dead weight), plan mode and saved plans, custom baton/handoff protocols, auto-memory (~/.claude/memory/, MEMORY.md indexing), --resume/--continue flags, vector-store memory MCPs (mcp-memory-service, etc.), embedding-based session retrieval, /compact vs /clear vs --resume tradeoffs. Practitioners who have actually solved sub-3s startup and their full stack with benchmarks.
Sources: 16 gathered, consolidated, synthesized.

Sources

  1. Claude Code Context Buffer: The 33K-45K Token Problem (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  2. Claude Code Token Optimization: Full System Guide (2026) (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  3. Claude Code 1M Context Window: Cost, Limits, and When to Use It (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  4. Extend Claude with skills — Official Claude Code Docs (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  5. Claude Code --continue and --resume: Never Lose Your Context Again (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  6. mcp-memory-service — Open-source persistent memory for AI agent pipelines (GitHub) (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  7. claude-mem — AI-powered session capture and context injection plugin for Claude Code (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  8. Using Claude Code: Session Management and 1M Context — Official Anthropic Blog (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  9. AI Agent Handoff: Why Context Breaks & How to Fix It — XTrace (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  10. How Claude remembers your project — Official Claude Code Docs (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  11. Don't Break the Cache: An Evaluation of Prompt Caching for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  12. Dive into Claude Code: A Systematic Analysis of Claude Code for AI Agent Systems (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  13. Claude Code Token Optimization: Full System Guide (2026) (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  14. Claude Code Context Buffer: The 33K-45K Token Problem (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  15. Essential Claude Code Skills and Commands | (think) (retrieved 2026-04-27)
  16. Claude Code Customization: CLAUDE.md, Slash Commands, Skills, and Subagents (retrieved 2026-04-27)

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