Claude Code /loop Daemon Hygiene#

A claude /loop 5m /role-daemon daemon is the easiest way to run an autonomous agent on a Max subscription: tmux session, one command, comes back every five minutes forever. It works perfectly for the first hour. By hour six it has accumulated 50,000+ tokens of stale “in cycle 47 I posted to MM” history that ships to Anthropic on every prompt. By day two it has three overlapping cron entries firing the same daemon every two minutes instead of every five. By day three it has auto-compact-exited and the tmux session is bare.

Two-Pass Analysis: Summarize-Then-Correlate#

A 32B model with a 32K context window can process roughly 8-10 source files at once. A real codebase has hundreds. Concatenating everything into one prompt fails — the context overflows, quality degrades, and the model either truncates or hallucinates connections.

The two-pass pattern solves this by splitting analysis into two stages:

1. Pass 1 (Summarize): A fast 7B model reads each file independently and produces a focused summary.
2. Pass 2 (Correlate): A capable 32B model reads all summaries (which are much shorter than the original files) and answers the cross-cutting question.

This effectively multiplies your context window by the compression ratio of summarization — typically 10-20x. A 32K context that handles 10 files directly can handle 100-200 files through summaries.