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Faded Memory (Dynamic Context Management)

Status: ✅ Implemented (agent-directed chaptering)

Manage growing agent context by letting agents close completed work into named chapters — lossless, browsable, and agent-controlled.

What's Implemented

agex uses agent-directed chaptering for context management:

  • When input_tokens exceeds chaptering_trigger, the framework triggers a __chapter__ task
  • The agent reviews its event history and creates Chapter instances to close out completed work
  • Original events are preserved inside ChapterEvent and browsable via a /chapters VFS overlay
  • If context remains above the trigger after one round, chaptering fires again on the next action

This replaced the earlier automated summarization approach (SummaryEvent + low-detail rendering tiers), which was removed in favor of giving agents direct control over what gets compacted and how.

Benefits

✅ Agent autonomy: The agent decides what to chapter and writes its own summaries ✅ Lossless: Original events preserved inside chapters and browsable via VFS ✅ Natural boundaries: Chapters align with logical phases of work, not arbitrary token counts ✅ Long-running agents: Context stays manageable across many tasks and iterations

Future Explorations

  • Low-detail rendering tiers: Re-introduce deterministic budget reduction for older-but-unchaptered events (e.g., images → placeholders, truncated output). This would complement chaptering by reducing token cost of events the agent hasn't chaptered yet.

  • Cache-aware chaptering: Coordinate chapter boundaries with provider-side cache breakpoints (e.g., Anthropic's cache markers) to maximize cache hits when context is rebuilt.

Documentation

Related issue: Issue #5