"Aim for at least 20 minutes" you're fighting against context. With a 20min work, it will quickly exceed context size, and fallback to rely on some recent memories(best case). You could instead have smaller tasks/subtasks and let it follow them with testable results. Make it write tests and check acceptance criterias. When done: new session, new task. Small bits. HQ work with testable mini steps.
I find Claude Code now pretty efficient at summarizing context over time. If you have your implementation plan in a file (PLAN.md), it can reference the file again and I don't find you loose too much.
You might also want to look into the amount of lines outputted by your dev tools - we've found many to be problematic here, and we still have some work to do!! Those can easily consume huge context space and lead to cost increase or hallucinations. We've also had success relying on sub-agents to share the context load. I especially like the concept of a "librarian" sub-agent to keep larger search context out of the main agent window.
The issue with breaking down the task into small steps is it reduces your ability to fully move on to the next task on your own todo. But you're totally right there's a balance; the longer an agent work the more context it'll accumulate.
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"Aim for at least 20 minutes" you're fighting against context. With a 20min work, it will quickly exceed context size, and fallback to rely on some recent memories(best case). You could instead have smaller tasks/subtasks and let it follow them with testable results. Make it write tests and check acceptance criterias. When done: new session, new task. Small bits. HQ work with testable mini steps.
I find Claude Code now pretty efficient at summarizing context over time. If you have your implementation plan in a file (PLAN.md), it can reference the file again and I don't find you loose too much.
You might also want to look into the amount of lines outputted by your dev tools - we've found many to be problematic here, and we still have some work to do!! Those can easily consume huge context space and lead to cost increase or hallucinations. We've also had success relying on sub-agents to share the context load. I especially like the concept of a "librarian" sub-agent to keep larger search context out of the main agent window.
The issue with breaking down the task into small steps is it reduces your ability to fully move on to the next task on your own todo. But you're totally right there's a balance; the longer an agent work the more context it'll accumulate.