---
title: "How To Double Your Claude Code Sessions Without Restarting"
date: 2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00
author: "poornerd"
tags: ["claude-code", "ai", "developer", "howto"]
canonical: https://www.poornerd.com/2026/05/17/how-to-double-your-claude-code-sessions-without-restarting.html
source: Raw Markdown twin of the HTML article; content is the original source.
---
If you spend any real time in Claude Code, you've felt it: the context window fills up faster than you'd like. Long files, sprawling tool output, half-relevant docs — all of it competes for the same budget. Once that budget is gone, you're either compacting, restarting, or watching the model lose the thread.

That's where **RTK** comes in. It's a small tool I've started leaning on to keep my Claude Code context lean, and it's quietly become one of the highest-leverage things in my workflow.

## Why bother saving tokens?

A few reasons it matters more than people think:

1. **Better answers.** Smaller, more focused context means the model isn't fishing through noise. The signal-to-noise ratio is what actually drives output quality.
2. **Longer sessions.** Every token you save is a token you can spend later — on more code, more iteration, more back-and-forth before you hit a wall.
3. **Lower cost.** Tokens aren't free. On long agentic runs, the savings add up fast.

## What RTK actually helps with

The top things I use it for:

- **Trimming tool output before it hits context** — big file reads and command output get summarized down to what matters, not the full dump.
- **Reusing context across sessions** — instead of re-feeding the same project background every time, RTK keeps a compact version on hand.
- **Pruning stale turns** — older parts of the conversation that no longer matter get cleaned out so the live working set stays sharp.

## Installing it for Claude Code

Dead simple:

```bash
npm install -g rtk
rtk init
```

Then point Claude Code at it once and you're done. From there it runs in the background.

## What it looks like in practice

That's it. Short post, but if you're hitting context limits in Claude Code, RTK is worth ten minutes of your time.