alt Hacker NewsIt is annoying though, when you start a new chat for each topic you tend to have to re-write context a lot. I use Gemini 3, which I understand doesn’t have as good of a memory system as OpenAI. Even on single-file programming stuff, after a few rounds of iteration I tend to get to its context limit (the thinking model). Either because the answers degrade or it just throws the “oops something went wrong” error. Ok, time to restart from scratch and paste in the latest iteration.
I don’t understand how agentic IDEs handle this either. Or maybe it’s easier - it just resends the entire codebase every time. But where to cut the chat history? It feels to me like every time you re-prompt a convo, it should first tell itself to summarize the existing context as bullets as its internal prompt rather than re-sending the entire context.
Agentic IDEs/extensions usually continue the conversation until the context gets close to 80% full, then do the compacting. With both Codex and Claude Code you can actually observe that happening.
That said I find that in practice, Codex performance degrades significantly long before it comes to the point of automated compaction - and AFAIK there's no way to trigger it manually. Claude, on the other hand, has a command for to force compacting, but at the same time I rarely use it because it's so good at managing it by itself.
As far as multiple conversations, you can tell the model to update AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md or whatever is in their context by default) with things it needs to remember.