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Comment by damsta | Hacker News Reader

I don't like any of current solutions when it comes to compaction. I'd love to have a way to say what exactly should be summarized, because most of the time I just need to compact some noisy MCP tool calls, test runs and things like that. Just let me pick what should be summarized and keep the rest as is.

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You can do that in Pi!

> Extensions can intercept and customize both compaction and branch summarization

https://pi.dev/docs/latest/compaction

Just make an extension (or ask Pi to write an extension for itself) that intercepts compaction and leaves only what you want, or rewrites it in any other way. Should be just a few lines.

Sounds like you might like subagents. Agent > subagent receives agent context (presumably cached)->tool call->compact/summarise->return to main agent

I think /handoff on pi (or at least oh my pi) is what you are looking for

I mean, not to be flippant but can't you just prompt the agent to write a file as you're getting closer to the compaction limit? I tend to just go to roughly 50-70% context utilization and then tell the agent to summarize the conversation and save it to a file, manually /clear, then say let's continue that last conversation. You can inspect the summary first and make any changes.

The way I've done it has been when there's a longer task, I give it a markdown document that has a plan with numbered steps, and then for each step start a fresh context window and tell it to update that doc as it goes with any decisions taken or deviations from the plan, or other context needed for future steps. If it gets close to the end of the context I tell it to summarize the current state and anything a fresh context would need to know.

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