How to Restart Claude Code (and When You Actually Should)

Sometimes the fastest way forward in Claude Code is backward: end the current session and start clean. Here's every way to restart — and, more importantly, when a fresh session beats nursing the one you've got.

The ways to restart

From lightest to heaviest:

• /clear — wipes the conversation context and gives you an empty window in the same directory. Your CLAUDE.md reloads automatically. The fastest reset; the old transcript is saved to disk (resumable), so you're not losing it, just setting it down.
• /compact — not a full restart, but a soft one: it summarizes the conversation and continues, freeing space while keeping the thread.
• A brand-new session — quit and run claude again. Note: quitting doesn't destroy anything — sessions save continuously to disk — so a genuinely fresh context means /clear or simply not resuming the old one.
• claude --continue — the opposite of a restart: resumes your last session right where you left it.

What survives every restart: your files, git, and CLAUDE.md. What doesn't: the in-context reasoning. (Full breakdown: /clear vs /compact vs kill.)

When you should restart

Restart when the context has turned into a liability, not an asset:

• It's looping — re-reading files, re-trying the same failed fix. (Why restarting beats debugging →)
• A wrong assumption anchored early and now steers everything.
• You've corrected the same thing twice and it came back a third time.
• You're switching tasks — don't let task A's context bleed into task B.
• The window's bloated and every turn is slow and expensive. (Why sessions burn tokens →)

The tell: when your job becomes managing the confused agent instead of shipping the feature, restart.

Restart well — don't just reset

A restart without a better opening line just puts you back at the start. Spend the one thing you earned in the dead session — knowledge — on the new one's first prompt: "We're adding X. The last attempt failed because Y. Start from that constraint." A clean session that opens with the lesson clears in two turns what the old one couldn't in ten. (The full philosophy: shoot your Claude Code in the head.)

Across many sessions

Restarting one session is easy. The harder version: knowing which of your five running sessions needs it. Mwah floats each live Claude Code session on your desktop as a robot flagged ALIVE or STUCK, so the one that needs a restart is obvious — and ending it is one click.

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Related: /clear vs /compact vs kill · Stuck in a loop?