pi-context-condense

Start a fresh pi session seeded with your conversation's flattened transcript. No LLM summary, no tokens burned, nothing paraphrased.

/condense takes your current session, strips it down to its conversation spine — user and assistant text only — and opens a clean session whose first message is that transcript. The old session stays on disk, untouched, linked as the new session's parent.

Why

Pi's built-in /compact summarizes context with an LLM call: costs tokens, risks losing details in paraphrase, and hides what was dropped inside a summary paragraph.

/condense does it by deletion instead of rewriting:

	/compact	/condense
Cost	1 LLM call	0 tokens
Fidelity	paraphrase risk	exact, verbatim
What you get	summary paragraph	the raw conversation
Auditable	no	yes — you can read exactly what the new session knows

Great for conversation-heavy threads — design discussions, Q&A, planning — where tool output is noise and the text spine is what matters.

Measured

Real numbers from 54 pi sessions (same flatten logic, run over session files):

Average reduction	95.5% smaller — 7.1 MB of session files → 321 KB of transcript
Best session	99.8% smaller
Cost	0 tokens, 0 LLM calls

Install

pi install npm:pi-context-condense
pi install git:github.com/ktappdev/pi-condense  # direct from git

Then reload (/reload) or restart pi.

Usage

/condense

What happens:

1. Waits for the agent to go idle, then flattens the current branch into one transcript: user + assistant text, thinking blocks dropped, tool calls/results dropped, compaction summaries kept.
2. If the transcript is over ~25k tokens, asks before continuing.
3. Creates a new session whose first message is the transcript.
4. Waits for your next message — nothing is sent automatically.

The old session remains on disk; /resume still finds it.

Trade-offs

• Tool calls and results don't survive the flatten. The new session knows what was said, not every command that was run. Coding sessions with heavy execution state may lose more than a summary would keep.
• No size reduction on the kept text. 100 turns of conversation stays 100 turns. For long text-heavy threads, the transcript can be large — hence the 25k-token guard.
• Condense never deletes. It forks forward. Worst case, resume the parent.

Requirements

Pi (tested on 0.84+). TUI mode only — /condense refuses non-interactive sessions.