I was putting together a package of documents with Claude, over more than one chat. One afternoon I picked it up again, so I asked Claude to retrieve where the last chat ended and deliver the complete set of documents for Word. It did that, with a summary.
Then the chat hit its length limit. A long chat fills up, and a new chat starts empty and cannot see the old one, so I was about to lose the context.
So before leaving it, I had Claude write a handoff file in markdown, meant for a fresh tab, with the instruction to look at the project files. A handoff note written at the end carries the work into the next chat.
Nine days later I did the same thing in a different chat, on a research idea. I had it write a summary of the conversation as a markdown file to continue elsewhere, then in another chat I asked for step by step instructions and started on step 1. That same day I had also asked Claude what tokens are, and got the explanation of tokens against words and what context length means.