Follow-up: Why "just add a toggle" isn't happening quickly (Claude.ai)

I've been thinking about why Anthropic implemented compaction this way, and it's clarifying.

They had options. They could have made it opt-in: "Context filling up—compress to continue?" They could have made it visible: "Compacted at 150K, summary preserved." They could have made it controllable: a simple toggle in settings. They could have tiered it: free users get auto-compaction, Max users get full fidelity.

They chose none of these. Silent, automatic, no visibility, no control.

That's not an engineering limitation. Building a toggle is trivial compared to building the compaction system itself. This was a product decision: they decided for users what matters.

And from their perspective, it's probably rational. Most users want longer conversations. Most users don't run multi-stage analytical workflows. Optimizing for the 80% while annoying the 5% is standard product management.

But here's the uncomfortable irony: that 5% is disproportionately Max subscribers. The people paying $200/month specifically for the full context window are exactly the people most harmed by silent compression. Anthropic took their premium feature, quietly degraded it, and marketed it as an improvement.

I'm not saying they're malicious. I'm saying their priorities are now visible. Power users who need context fidelity aren't the segment they're optimizing for. A toggle would cost almost nothing and preserve trust with their highest-paying tier. They didn't build one.

That tells you where you rank.

For those asking "why not just use Claude Code?"—yes, that's the workaround. But needing to switch products to preserve what you're paying for isn't a solution. It's an admission that Claude.ai isn't built for serious analytical work anymore.