A long conversation eventually just stops working. Compaction summarises the
earlier turns and sends the summary in their place.
The messages are kept. They stay in the transcript behind a collapsed
divider and simply stop being part of the request, which is what makes the
button safe to press and automatic compaction safe to have at all: a summary
that came out badly is a bad turn, not a lost conversation.
Stored on the Chat, not as a synthetic Message. A synthetic row needs a
role -- `system` breaks the one-system-message rule the moment build_messages
emits it beside the harness, and user/assistant makes it a turn people can
edit, regenerate from and copy, indistinguishable from a real one in all
four places a bubble is rendered. Worse, "editing rewinds, it does not
branch" would silently delete it and leave no marker that compaction had
happened at all.
The summary goes out as a user turn and an assistant turn, not one. A
leading assistant breaks templates requiring the first non-system message to
be user; a lone leading user produces user, user whenever the kept history
starts on a user turn -- which it always does, because the cutoff lands on a
finished reply.
compacted_through_id is a plain id rather than a foreign key: migrations.py
compiles only the column type, so a REFERENCES clause would exist on a fresh
database and not on an upgraded one, and a constraint half the fleet has is
worse than none. cutoff_message validates it on every read instead, and a
rewind past the boundary clears it.
Compacting again summarises only the delta, with the previous summary
supplied to be subsumed. Re-summarising the whole chat each time grows
quadratically and eventually exceeds the window it is protecting.
Automatically at the top of _run, not in post_message: that route's contract
is to return immediately and leave the slow part to a resumable connection,
and it also means build_request is called once, after compaction, with no
second assembly path. The trigger is the last reply's recorded usage plus an
estimate of the new turn -- retrospective because true prompt_tokens are only
knowable after a response, plus the delta because otherwise fifty thousand
characters pasted into the composer overflow a window that read 90% last
turn. It never fires when the context length is unknown. It does fire on
estimated counts, which is safe here precisely because nothing is lost.
_maybe_compact never raises: a failure logs and sends the uncompacted
request. A `status` event says "Summarising earlier messages…" in the
meantime, because a silent multi-second pause before the first token is what
a hang looks like.
The wording is three fragments under Admin - Prompts. Clearing task.compact
turns compaction off entirely.
Also adds compaction.moment(): SQLite does not store the offset, so a row
loaded from disk is naive while one in the session's identity map keeps its
tzinfo, and comparing the two raises. Every comparison here is between
exactly those.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
chat/index.html and chat/_thread.html held the same loop, so anything added
to the conversation -- a compaction divider, say -- would have had to be
written into both and kept in step by hand. index.html includes the partial
instead.
The sidebar toggle was a raw inline onclick, the only one left in the
application. app.js already delegates [data-toggle="#selector"] and gives
open/close, aria-expanded and an is-active button state for free; the chat
settings gear has used it all along. Also deletes the
.sidebar[data-collapsed="true"] rule, which nothing has ever set.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Seven things.
**Reasoning starts closed.** The answer is what the reader is waiting
for; the thinking is one click away.
**Image borders.** .attachments__image was a block-level <a>, so its
border stretched the full column around a narrow picture. inline-block,
and the frame is the picture. Same fix for the composer thumbnail.
**Markdown now renders during the stream.** The generator re-renders the
answer so far and sends it as a `render` event at most every 100ms,
swapped with innerHTML, instead of appending escaped tokens and
formatting everything at the end. Re-rendering whole rather than
appending is the point: a list or a code fence is only correct once its
context exists, and partial syntax resolves itself as more arrives.
Measured against a live model: 29 render events, formatting visible from
the first content token.
**Stop button.** A stop request goes into an in-process set the
generator checks between chunks; whatever arrived is kept, because a
half-written answer the reader chose to cut short is still worth having.
Measured: stream ended 0.2s after the request, 1155 characters
preserved, message marked stopped rather than errored. Navigating away
does the same thing via CancelledError.
**Rewind and edit.** Edit one of your own turns and everything after it
is deleted, then the conversation runs on from there. Deliberately not
branching: that needs a UI for choosing between versions, and "go back
and try again from here" is what was asked for. The form states how many
messages will be discarded before you confirm.
**Custom model picker.** A <select> renders only text in an <option>, so
it can never show an avatar. Built from buttons and a hidden input, with
descriptions, capability tags, a filter box past eight models, and
arrow-key navigation written out by hand since there is no native widget
doing it.
**Notification system.** lembas.notify/confirm/prompt in ui.js, built on
<dialog> so focus trapping, Escape and page inertness come from the
browser. htmx:confirm is intercepted, so every existing hx-confirm gets
the themed dialog with no change at the call site; the browser's grey
confirm() is gone from every template.
230 tests, ruff clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jaroslav Beneš