The fact there is no way to disable auto-compaction like every other coding harness makes me scream. It fires randomly at 10-20%, so really you now only have guaranteed context of 272k * 80%. So many times I've had it work on a large codebase, it is almost done with a task, it needs maybe a 2000 token response, but it drops below 20%, it churns and churns and churns and then I see the dreaded ``Context compacted`` and scream. You can't go back in the history to the state of the conversation before the compaction. So then it has to investigate the codebase again gets to 20% and then auto-compacts. So it then has to read more, and then auto-compacts again, and then I'm out of tokens.
Pardon the plug, but I have built a tool that ingests the state of conversations to a local DB in realtime. It has both macOS and Linux clients.
When context compaction introduces a gap, I use the /total-recall skill to pull prior turns back into context and off it goes.
The tool is free for personal use and has a source available local cloud option to sync convo histories across multiple machines.
Use pi. Can't trust OAI or Anthropic to make good tools.