wtf is context-health-bar?

Context Health Bar is a Chrome extension that helps you keep your Claude conversations productive. When you have a long chat going, Claude can start to lose track of earlier instructions or repeat itself. This tool shows a small colored orb at the top of the page that acts like a fuel gauge, telling you when the conversation is getting too long and it's time to start fresh. The orb changes from green to yellow to red as your conversation grows. It calculates this "health score" by looking at a few things: how far back your last important instruction was, how long the overall conversation is, and whether the assistant has been doing most of the talking. It doesn't peek at Claude's internal workings, it just reads what's visible on the page and makes an educated guess about how well things are going. You can hover over the orb to see character counts, token estimates, and message stats. The real payoff is the "Refresh Context" button. When your health is dropping, you click it and the extension opens a brand new Claude chat with a formatted summary of your previous conversation. This summary includes your original request, key highlights, the current focus, and recent exchanges. You can pick from three detail levels, compact, standard, or rich, depending on how much context you want to carry over. If you'd rather paste it somewhere yourself, there's a copy button too. This is for anyone who uses Claude for extended working sessions, debugging code, drafting long documents, or complex research where a single conversation might stretch across dozens of messages. Instead of hitting a wall where Claude seems confused or forgetful, you get an early warning and a clean handoff. You can also pin specific messages as "core instructions" so the health calculation knows what matters most to you. The extension is free and open source under an MIT license.