Managing long conversations

Long working sessions accumulate context the same way any extended chat does, file contents that were read, search results, prior explanations, and at some point that accumulated context becomes large enough to slow things down or crowd out what is actually relevant right now.

/compact addresses this directly: it summarizes everything so far and starts a new conversation seeded from that summary, keeping the thread of what you were working on without carrying every past tool result forward verbatim, word for word.

/clear is the blunter version of the same idea, dropping the current conversation entirely rather than summarizing it. Reach for /clear when you are genuinely switching to unrelated work, and /compact when you want to keep going but the session has gotten heavy.

Neither command affects anything already saved to memory; both only touch the current conversation's own context. Anything tAI has been asked to remember, covered in How memory carries over, persists across a /clear the same way it persists across starting a brand new session entirely.