Agent Anti-Patterns · ~6 min

The Kitchen Sink Session

One session, running all day, doing everything. It feels efficient. It is quietly poisoning every task after the first.

It's tempting to keep one Claude Code session open and pile tasks on: review a PR, then start a feature, then debug a test. Each task leaves residue — file contents, command outputs, failed approaches, off-topic reasoning. The context fills with the leftovers of work you've already finished.

1 What it looks like

A developer reviews a PR all morning, then scaffolds a feature, then chases a flaky test — same session. By the third task the window holds diff hunks, file reads, and unrelated error logs. Ask Claude to name a new service class and it may anchor on naming patterns from the PR rather than the feature in front of it. The history isn't just dead weight; it actively steers the current decision.

2 Why it happens

The Claude Code best-practices docs name this directly: the kitchen-sink session, where context full of irrelevant information degrades the current task. Independent research by Chroma on context rot corroborates it — across 18 frontier models, performance varies with input length even on simple tasks, and irrelevant tokens degrade reliability more than length alone would predict.

3 The fix

One objective per session. When you finish and move to something unrelated, start a new session — not a /clear in the old one. Session history is saved locally, so a fresh start loses nothing.

Use /clear only between loosely related tasks where shared background still applies, and /rename to give sessions findable names like oauth-migration.