Two hours into a Claude Code session spent reading files in a large codebase, Claude now describes "the typical repository pattern" instead of naming the OrderRepository class it found earlier, and gives different answers to the same question. What is the best next step?

Answer: B — Save the key findings to a scratchpad file, then run /compact and refer to that file

References to "typical patterns" and inconsistent answers are signs of context degradation. Persisting findings in a scratchpad and compacting verbose discovery output restores a usable context without losing specifics. (A) keeps relying on the degraded session. (C) adds more verbose content. (D) throws away the work instead of preserving it.