This is one of the advantages of pi. I made a /protect command that protects the message from compaction. I also protect skills automatically.
So for long running tasks I'll do
/protect your goal is...So for long running tasks I'll do
/protect your goal is.../brains inspect
that will let you inspect a session and one of the features is the ability to review a compacted message like so:
https://gitsense.com/screenshots/inspect-pi-session-compacte...
https://gitsense.com/screenshots/inspect-pi-session-compacte...
https://gitsense.com/screenshots/inspect-pi-session-compacte...
With /compact in Pi, it creates a message that you can easily review and I am curious as to how '/protect' works.
One of the features that I am working on is to make it easy for agents to retrieve the exact message/event before compaction and I am curious if /protect is a deterministic process or if it is just instructions.
That's what I thought about RTK and Headroom too but when I did some fairly basic evals across a small set of tasks (a matrix of RTK, Headroom, both, or off) it came back very clear that off was best. I didn't dig into why too deeply due to lack of time, but it looked like the token reduction per turn was being replaced by the model needing more turns.
That and building my own pi extensions made me realize there's a lot of subtly here. I can build a tool that on paper works perfectly but tuning the system prompt to get it used correctly takes time and evals.
The problem is, nobody is doing them, or not well, and not reproducibly.
This looks especially hard for something designed for very long running tasks. We'd need to set up one version using normal compaction, one using this, across several tasks, leave them running for hours (burning tons of tokens) and then repeat at least a couple of times. If we don't do that, we're just guessing.
Edit: removed off topic political spam
It's unrelated to my direct comment and it's a generic tangent off the thread further up, which is about technical issues with Claude Code. As the guidelines say:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Nobody wants to see you hijacking technical threads to turn them into political flamewars. It's against the guidelines, anti-intellectual, and profoundly boring.