I Stopped Using Claude Code 'Correctly' and Got 3 Faster

I was three hours into debugging a race condition when Claude Code told me it needed to compact the conversation. You've seen this. The scroll starts. Twelve tool calls get collapsed into "I searched for the session handler." Eight file reads become "I reviewed the auth flow." All the concrete details - the exact line where the token was mutated, the specific test that flaked - gone. What remains is Claude's polite summary of what it thinks happened, which is not quite what happened. I fixed the bug an hour later, in a new conversation, without Claude's help.