How to Run Claude Code 24/7 Without Burning Your Context Window

Implement a hard 50K token session cap and a three-tier memory system (daily notes, MEMORY.md, PARA knowledge graph) to prevent context bloat and memory decay in long-running Claude Code agents. The Technique: Session Discipline & Structured Memory Running a Claude Code agent for a weekend project is easy. Running it for 67 days straight in production—handling emails, deployments, and business logic—requires a specific architecture to avoid collapse. The core insight from this real-world deployment is that you must manage two things aggressively: context window bloat and memory retrieval decay . Why It Works: The Physics of Long-Running Sessions Every tool call, file read, and API response inflates your context window. A single "heartbeat" check that reads email, calendar, and social media can consume 15K tokens. At that rate, a 200K context window is exhausted in under 7 hours if you run checks every 30 minutes. The agent becomes sluggish, starts hallucinating, and your API costs spir