Claude Code hides your context window. /statusline is the fix.
ยท 5 min read
If you know Ralph loops, you know the punchline: context rot silently kills productivity. The quality of the model does not matter. After the working window fills past ~70%, output quality drops off a cliff. When you notice the regression, you have lost half the session.
Few people mention the next fact: Claude Code does not show context usage by default.
In the middle of a hot loop, your window can be 90% full, and the terminal shows no sign. Your next response is mush. You blame the model, you run /clear, and you lose the thread. All the context data that you needed was on stdin, and no script rendered the data.
/statusline renders that data.