Its really not tiny; you can't compare Claude to GPT, they have honestly diverged enough that as the other reply said, 256k GPT is about equal to 1M Claude. The compaction is slightly annoying, and you can turn it up to 1M as you said if you truly need everything in context, but otherwise it's perfectly serviceable
Absolutely not my experience. I've been a long time Claude user and at work people slowly started using Claude too. I canceled Claude for my personal account due to the Astra hype, but I'm back after a single month and the absolutely ridiculous context window is one of the many reasons.
I barely compact at work in a very complex monorepo (neither with Fable 5.1 nor Opus 5.5), and yet in my personal greenfield project Astra keeps compacting all the time, to the point of it being unusable.
