cornerman
I started this to save tokens. Then I felt the work hold up better over long stretches. My tests couldn’t confirm that, so treat it as how it felt to me.
- Windows
- Linux
- macOS
macOS runs in the automated tests but has not been tested by hand.
Context counter. How full the chat is, filling towards the nudge size. Hover it to see which handover the tab loaded.
#Why not auto-compaction?
When a chat gets full, Claude Code’s auto-compaction squeezes it into a summary you never see, and carries on in the same chat. Cornerman writes a handover, a short note of the goal, what’s done and what’s next, that you can open and edit. It starts a fresh chat from that note and keeps the old chat’s tables, lists, links and paths one click away.
| Claude keeps | You lose | Chat size after | |
|---|---|---|---|
/compact | Its own summary of the chat | What the summary leaves out | Smaller |
--resume | The whole chat | Nothing | Same as before |
/clear | Nothing | Everything, including where you were | Empty |
| cornerman | A short handover it wrote on purpose | The rest of the chat | Just the handover |
#Measured
- Return to a 390k-token session after the cache expired: full rewrite vs fresh session from a handover
- US$1.56 vs US$0.15 to 0.17
- n=3, Sonnet 5.5, 10 Oct 2026
- Switch a 390k-token Sonnet 5.5 session to Opus: carry the whole context vs start fresh from a handover
- US$3.13 vs US$0.24
- n=1, 8 Oct 2026
- A whole build, Sonnet 5.5, finished runs: relay vs auto-compaction vs never compacting
- US$9.08 vs US$9.19 vs US$9.66
- n=5, n=5, n=3
#Install
claude plugin marketplace add https://github.com/m4cd4r4/cornerman
claude plugin install cornerman@cornermancode --install-extension macdara.cornermanVS Code Marketplace · Open VSX (VSCodium, Cursor)
#What you’ll see first
A pie in the VS Code status bar shows how full the chat is. Nothing else happens until the chat reaches 250k tokens. To see a handover sooner, hover the pie and click Hand over now.
#How it’s built
