A housing counseling chat runs long and context grows stale. What session-hygiene design fits?

Session hygiene keeps housing counseling assistants usable as resident conversations lengthen and older turns crowd the context window. Clearing or summarizing stale turns works because it preserves current eligibility facts and system policy while reducing token waste, distraction, and contradictory cues from earlier digressions. Housing counselors often switch among intake details, waitlist rules, and follow-up questions; deliberate history management keeps Claude focused on the active counseling goal rather than every prior aside. Expanding the context window to hold more stale housing dialogue fails because a bigger window still dilutes relevance, burns context budget, and can surface outdated resident statements as if they were still authoritative. Retaining verbatim history to improve housing session recall fails conceptually because verbatim text keeps every aside and outdated turn in play, crowding out the active counseling goal and program rules rather than improving useful recall. Storing eligibility details in client cache for faster housing responses fails as a session-hygiene design because client-side caching does not prune stale turns from the active conversation, so the session still carries outdated dialogue and contradictory cues while adding cache-management complexity. Exam caveat: summarization itself can drop a critical eligibility detail if the summary prompt is careless, so summaries must preserve identifiers, dates, and decision-relevant constraints rather than only narrative tone. Operational check: define a housing-session retention policy (when to summarize, what fields must survive, when to hard-reset), log summarization events for case QA, and spot-check that post-summary answers still cite the active policy layer rather than pruned chatter.