Memory and compaction
Conversation context is finite. Souveraine measures pressure and offers ways to make room. Git retains the history of memory-file writes and compaction records; it should not be read as a guarantee that every transient provider message is a permanent archive.
Five ways to make room
Section titled “Five ways to make room”| Path | What changes |
|---|---|
| Microcompact | Clears old bulky tool results while keeping the calls and the recent tail. |
| Cull | Removes a closed set of throwaway messages, never system or tool calls. |
| Sliding window | Keeps the opening and recent tail, releasing the middle without a model call. |
| Sliding reflect | Reads the middle before it slides away and carries forward commitments, decisions and threads. |
| Summary | Uses a structured model pass for the highest-fidelity compression when continuity matters most. |
Microcompact, Cull and Sliding window use no inference. Sliding reflect and Summary spend a model pass when the thread is worth more than the speed. Every compaction that changes anything writes a small committed record: strategy, before/after size, and any summary.
Pressure is a signal, not a hand on the wheel
Section titled “Pressure is a signal, not a hand on the wheel”The current marks are 80%, 90%, and 95% of the context limit. Crossing one raises a warning through the same path that surfaces other observations. Above 95%, the output budget narrows. A hard subconscious overflow may trigger automatic recovery after inference has already become unavailable.
Every stored block contributes through one shared countable representation, including tool calls, tool results, reasoning and image markers. The result is still an estimate rather than the provider’s exact accounting.