Compact earlier

Pi waits until the session is almost out of room before it summarizes. On a large model that can be hundreds of thousands of tokens too late, and the summary itself can fail.

• Where: install pi-compact (Packages), then /compact-edit in the Pi session.
• Not this: PiCode never compacts on its own. This is not deleting history — it is an earlier summary, and only where the package is installed.

pi-compact is an optional pi package — an extension, not part of PiCode core. It stays dormant until you write a config file. Uninstall it (or delete the config) and every session is back to Pi's stock behavior, byte for byte.

Install packages/pi-compact from the PiCode repository. Guide for install targets: Packages.

pi install /path/to/picode/packages/pi-compact

While there is no config file, nothing happens — Pi's own compaction runs exactly as before, and the status line reads compact: not configured · /compact-edit.

Once you save a config (/compact-edit, /compact-model, or a hand-written .pi/compact.json), the package:

• compacts when the session hits 100 000 tokens or half the window, whichever comes first (never below 32 000) — always at the end of a run, never mid-flight
• summarizes with your configured model first, then its fallback models — gemini-3.6-flash, then Haiku, then the session model by default — thinking off; if a link fails, the next one takes over
• keeps the recent work Pi already keeps (the last ~20 000 tokens)
• leaves Pi's last-resort compact on

Where it runs

	What you get
Pi TUI (terminal)	The commands below, early compact, the cheap summarizer on every compaction
PiCode chat	Same summarizer on /compact (PiCode's summarize button); the wizard runs in the agent terminal
PiCode core	Nothing — the daemon has no compact logic of its own; it only tells the package which agent it is (see below)

Commands

You type	What happens
/compact	Pi's own compact-now (uses this package's summarizer when configured)
/compact-edit	Wizard: when, which model, fallback, thinking, where to save
/compact-model	Only the summarizer chain
/compact-on / /compact-off	Pause or resume early compact for this session (configured only)

Why the dash? Pi's terminal owns /compact itself — its input loop handles /compact … before any extension command, so the wizard lives one dash away. Bare /compact keeps working exactly as Pi built it.

Config and scopes

The code is global (installed once into pi); the config is per file, never per machine. Two layers, the agent on top:

Layer	File	Who reads it
Workspace	<workspace>/.pi/compact.json	every agent in the folder
Agent overlay	<workspace>/.pi/compact/<agent>.json	that one agent, wins over workspace

Either file turns the package on. /compact-edit shows exactly what it will save; in PiCode it asks Save to: this agent, or the whole folder. A pi you start yourself in a terminal writes the workspace file.

A minimal hand-written config:

{ "atTokens": 100000, "model": "google/gemini-3.6-flash", "thinking": "off" }

All keys — atTokens, atPercent, model, fallback, thinking, cooldownTurns — are optional and documented in compact.schema.json; delete the file to go back to Pi's stock behavior.

How you know it worked

When a compaction runs, the agent shows Summarizing with <model> (<thinking>)…. The session JSONL records the proof: the compaction entry carries "from": "pi-compact" plus the summarizer and thinking that produced the summary. No such fields — that compaction was Pi's own.