Claude was on fire. Then it wasn't.

Somewhere past the hour mark, a brilliant Claude session goes bad. It starts forgetting things you settled twenty minutes ago, getting basic details wrong, and suddenly you're arguing with it like that one team member who never followed instructions.

Most people push through and explain harder. It's a fair instinct, because when a person forgets something you remind them. With Claude, it makes things worse. Every extra explanation becomes more history it has to carry.

Every message you send makes Claude re-read the entire conversation before it answers, including every dead end and every wrong answer along the way. Past a few dozen messages, it's juggling so much history that the quality drops. Nothing has happened to the model. It's answering your new question through an hour of accumulated baggage.

The fix takes ten seconds.

Ask the old chat for a handover. Type: summarise where we are, what's decided, and what's left to do. Copy the answer, open a fresh chat, paste it in, and carry on. You get full speed back without re-explaining anything, because the handover carries the decisions forward and leaves the dead ends behind.

Do it the first time you catch yourself repeating an instruction, because that's the sign the chat is full.

I do this constantly. On a heavy day I'll get through ten chats on one piece of work, and the tenth is as sharp as the first, because no chat ever gets long enough to sag.

Treat chats like pages in a notebook. The moment one gets messy, take a handover and turn the page.