Fix

Claude says the conversation is too long — what to do

You're mid-flow and Claude tells you the conversation has hit its length limit. The chat you built up won't take another message. Here's how to save the work and keep moving without re-explaining everything.

Why this happens

Claude reads the entire conversation on every turn, and it can only hold so much at once — a fixed budget of space shared by every message you've sent and every reply it's written. A long thread, especially one with big pasted documents or lots of back-and-forth, eventually fills that budget. When there's no room left, Claude can't take the next message, so you get the "too long" wall.

It's not a glitch and it's not fixable from inside the same chat. The thread is simply full. The move is to carry the important parts into a fresh conversation.

Don't do these first

Don't keep retrying the same message. The chat is at capacity; resending won't create room.
Don't just start over blank. A brand-new chat with none of your context means re-explaining everything from scratch.
Don't delete messages hoping to free space. You'll lose work and still be near the ceiling.

The fix: fresh chat plus a handoff

Open a new conversation and give it a tight brief of what came before — your goal, the decisions already locked in, the constraints that matter, and where you left off. A fresh chat with a clean brief picks up right where the full one stopped, and it runs fast again because it's no longer dragging the entire history.

Scroll the maxed-out chat and pull out the essentials: the goal, decisions made, key constraints, and the current state or last output.
Open a new Claude conversation.
Paste a short handoff brief as your first message (template below).
Let Claude confirm it has the context, then continue.

Copy-paste handoff template

Fill this in from the full thread and paste it into the new chat:

I'm continuing work from an earlier conversation that got too long. Here's the context.

GOAL: [what I'm trying to accomplish]

DECISIONS ALREADY MADE (do not reopen):
- [decision 1]
- [decision 2]

CONSTRAINTS / RULES:
- [constraint 1]
- [constraint 2]

CURRENT STATE: [last output or where we stopped]

NEXT: [what I need next]

Confirm you've got this, then let's continue.

Pulling the brief out by hand is the slow part

Reading back through a huge thread to find every decision and constraint is exactly the tedious step people dread. Sharing the conversation to a tool that reads it for you skips that — you get the handoff pre-written and just check it.

Avoid the wall next time

Start a fresh chat for each distinct task instead of running one endless mega-thread. Put your core instructions in the first message so they stay near the front. And when a conversation starts feeling sluggish or forgetful, hand it off early — well before it hits the hard limit.

The faster way

Let Uncook write the handoff for you

Free & unlimited. No account.

Instead of scrolling a maxed-out thread to rebuild the context by hand, paste a share link to your Claude conversation. Uncook reads the whole thing and writes a clean reboot prompt — your goal, locked decisions, repeated constraints and current state, already assembled. Skim it, paste it into a fresh chat, and keep going.

Uncook my chat →

Honest about your data: pasted text is analyzed in your browser; a share link is fetched once through our server to read the conversation, then discarded — never stored, never used for training. A share link makes the chat viewable by anyone with the URL; un-share it once you're done.