I use Claude, but I don't know as much about it as you do. I'm confused about how much information Claude can hold in its "working memory" (not sure if that's the right term). You wrote: "When I ask Claude a health-related question, for example, it has access to every single medical record, including images, PDFs, spreadsheets; it takes all of that into account when it gives the answer." But later you wrote: "to save tokens, the best thing you can do is regularly clear the memory and start over on a new thread as often as possible.". Surely a folder full of PDFs and other documents would consume a whole lot of tokens? Can Claude retain all that information in working memory while also engaging in a conversation with you about some topic related to your health?
It can hold 1M tokens in its "context" (~"working memory"), and with normal prompting the context grows linearly at every turn: every new question sends the entire thread of prompts and answers. But all those medical records files are treated differently: first they're cached, so they only go in once; second, Claude is smart enough to focus on the relevant files only. tdlr; Claude uses optimization tricks based on the difference between static (Project Knowledge) and dynamic (your prompts) content.
How do you ask Claude to summarize a current thread so you can start a new thread but still have the context? Also how do you save summaries so you can build a knowledge base?
I understand how to share files with Claude, and how to create skills, but I guess I’m still a little confused how I can build a shared context with AI so not always starting from scratch.
"Context rot" is a thing. You might get equal or even better results (and use far fewer tokens) if you have Claude use skills to retrieve medical records on demand, rather than trying to keep everything in the context.
I use Claude, but I don't know as much about it as you do. I'm confused about how much information Claude can hold in its "working memory" (not sure if that's the right term). You wrote: "When I ask Claude a health-related question, for example, it has access to every single medical record, including images, PDFs, spreadsheets; it takes all of that into account when it gives the answer." But later you wrote: "to save tokens, the best thing you can do is regularly clear the memory and start over on a new thread as often as possible.". Surely a folder full of PDFs and other documents would consume a whole lot of tokens? Can Claude retain all that information in working memory while also engaging in a conversation with you about some topic related to your health?
It can hold 1M tokens in its "context" (~"working memory"), and with normal prompting the context grows linearly at every turn: every new question sends the entire thread of prompts and answers. But all those medical records files are treated differently: first they're cached, so they only go in once; second, Claude is smart enough to focus on the relevant files only. tdlr; Claude uses optimization tricks based on the difference between static (Project Knowledge) and dynamic (your prompts) content.
How do you ask Claude to summarize a current thread so you can start a new thread but still have the context? Also how do you save summaries so you can build a knowledge base?
I understand how to share files with Claude, and how to create skills, but I guess I’m still a little confused how I can build a shared context with AI so not always starting from scratch.
I connect my Claude to Obsidian and save all my summaries and “knowledge base” there.
Best rule of course when you’re unsure how to do something: ask Claude!
"Context rot" is a thing. You might get equal or even better results (and use far fewer tokens) if you have Claude use skills to retrieve medical records on demand, rather than trying to keep everything in the context.