My Claude Code Sessions Hit 70MB. So I Built a Distiller.

I had a 4-hour coding session with Claude Code. Felt productive. Fixed a bunch of bugs, refactored a module, reviewed some screenshots Claude took of the UI along the way. Then I tried to --resume it the next day. The session file was 73MB. Claude loaded it, burned through half the context window on old tool outputs and base64-encoded screenshots from yesterday, and started forgetting things I'd said 20 minutes ago. The conversation was fine. The cargo it was dragging around was not. I opened the JSONL. Here's what 73MB of "session" actually looks like: Conversation text: ~4MB (what we actually said) Tool results (Read): ~28MB (file contents Claude already read) Tool results (Bash): ~9MB (build outputs, test runs, logs) Base64 screenshots: ~22MB (UI screenshots, now stale) Tool results (Edit/Write): ~6MB (diffs and file previews) Everything else: ~4MB (metadata, tool_use blocks) 93% of the file is stuff Claude doesn't need to resume the conversation. The Read results are files that sti