You ran /clear to start something unrelated, and now you need the earlier discussion back. What is true of it?

The principle — clearing the screen and destroying the conversation are different things.

Why the key is correct — Anthropic documents that running /clear starts a new session, and that the previous one stays stored and is available via /resume. Nothing is thrown away; you simply have a fresh window in front of you, with the earlier thread still reachable by name.

Why the others are wrong — treating it as a delete is the belief that makes people avoid a harmless command. Summarising into the new session describes compaction, which is a separate mechanism with a different purpose. And a session outliving its terminal window is precisely the point of storing it, so the window is not what keeps it alive.

Remember this — /clear gives you a clean start, not a clean slate. The old thread is still there under its own identifier, and reopening it costs one command.

Sources — Anthropic's Claude Code glossary.