Compaction safeguard not triggering - hard truncation instead of smart compaction
What I'm trying to do:
Have conversations that gracefully compact when hitting context limits.
What's happening instead:
Session hit 161k/200k tokens (80%), but compaction never ran (counter shows 0). Instead of smart compaction, got hard truncation with a useless summary:
Summary unavailable due to context limits. Older messages were truncated.
Ironically, we were debugging this exact issue when the session truncated, losing all context about the problem.
Setup:
• Clawdbot 2026.1.23-1
• Model: claude-opus-4-5 (200k context)
• Hosting: Local gateway (macOS)
• Agent: main (Claude Code style)Observed behavior:
• session_status shows: Context: 161k/200k (80%) · Compactions: 0
• After truncation, context still reports 161k (possibly stale counter)
• Session was ~9 minutes, read 4 files (compaction-safeguard.js, memory-flush.js, etc.)Expected:
Safeguard mode should trigger compaction before hitting hard limits, preserving meaningful context.
Have conversations that gracefully compact when hitting context limits.
What's happening instead:
Session hit 161k/200k tokens (80%), but compaction never ran (counter shows 0). Instead of smart compaction, got hard truncation with a useless summary:
Summary unavailable due to context limits. Older messages were truncated.
Ironically, we were debugging this exact issue when the session truncated, losing all context about the problem.
Setup:
• Clawdbot 2026.1.23-1
• Model: claude-opus-4-5 (200k context)
• Hosting: Local gateway (macOS)
• Agent: main (Claude Code style)Observed behavior:
• session_status shows: Context: 161k/200k (80%) · Compactions: 0
• After truncation, context still reports 161k (possibly stale counter)
• Session was ~9 minutes, read 4 files (compaction-safeguard.js, memory-flush.js, etc.)Expected:
Safeguard mode should trigger compaction before hitting hard limits, preserving meaningful context.
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