Session Hygiene & Plugin Management

Session Hygiene

Because the Messages API is stateless and the context window is finite, what carries forward from turn to turn is a deliberate design decision, not an automatic default. Good Session hygiene means:

• Summarizing/compacting long threads instead of resending an ever-growing raw transcript
• **Starting a fresh Session** when context is polluted (dominated by stale, irrelevant, or noisy history) rather than continuing to build on a degraded thread
• Not letting stale tool output accumulate -- a large tool result that answered an earlier question doesn't need to ride along in every subsequent call

This is the same discipline as context curation generally, applied specifically to Session-level lifecycle decisions: when to keep going, when to compact, and when to cut over to a clean start.

Plugin Management

Connected extensions -- MCP servers, plugins -- need to be managed explicitly, not left as an implicit, undocumented set of capabilities:

• Which are enabled for a given Session or deployment
• What permissions they hold (least privilege matters here just as much as for any other tool access)
• Their versions (so an upstream plugin update doesn't silently change behavior)

Common exam traps

• Assuming a stateless API "just works" if you resend everything -- unbounded accumulation of history and tool output degrades quality even though nothing is technically wrong with the request.
• Continuing to patch a polluted Session with more instructions rather than recognizing that a fresh Session is sometimes the correct fix.
• Treating connected plugins/MCP servers as a fixed, install-once inventory rather than something that needs ongoing tracking of enablement, permissions, and version.