It's like working with humans:

  1) define problem
  2) split problem into small independently verifiable tasks
  3) implement tasks one by one, verify with tools

With humans 1) is the spec, 2) is the Jira or whatever tasks

With an LLM usually 1) is just a markdown file, 2) is a markdown checklist, Github issues (which Claude can use with the `gh` cli) and every loop of 3 gets a fresh context, maybe the spec from step 1 and the relevant task information from 2

I haven't ran into context issues in a LONG time, and if I have it's usually been either intentional (it's a problem where compacting wont' hurt) or an error on my part.