> Claude caches for 1hr

Yep, AFAIK. I have a statusline that tells me how far I'm into the cache lifetime. I tend to have dense prompts and carefully read its outputs, so by the time this outage occurred when I was ~50m into it. Cue frantically spamming "esc esc up enter", and 10m later it's dead Jim.

It depends.

Let’s say I’ve already worked on something, so the KV cache is already there. If I use /clear, I’ll have to do that work again.

And yes, the KV cache will remain available for one hour, but who knows when this claude api will recover? We might forget about it, and when we come back after an hour—boom - we’ll be charged for cold writes.