Hacktoberfest 2026: los issues que los mantenedores marcaron para octubre, abiertos y aptos para principiantes. Explorar issues de Hacktoberfest

Compaction injects a stale summary when the model does not call `compact_chat`

Abierto
  • ¿Algo no está bien?
#629 0 comentarios 0 reacciones 0 asignados Ver en GitHub

Los mantenedores suelen responder en 2 días

Nadie ha tomado este issue todavía.

Evaluación

Dificultad
4/5
Tiempo estimado
3-5 días
Aptitud para principiantes
58/100
Tipo de issue
Error
Claridad
Bien especificado
Estado de actividad
Activo
Stack tecnológico
clojure
Área
ai, backend

Línea de trabajo

Start by tracing compaction through src/eca/features/tools/chat.clj (compact-chat), src/eca/features/chat.clj (trigger-compact!), src/eca/features/chat/lifecycle.clj (complete-compact!), and src/eca/shared.clj (compact-side-effect!). Check how the current compaction's tool call is tracked and how a text-only response reaches the finish side effect. Add a test with a fake LLM returning text only; done means the old summary is not silently injected and failure or recovery is handled visibly.

Escrito por el modelo de indexación a partir del texto del issue.

Descripción

bug

Summary

When the LLM answers the compact prompt with plain text instead of calling the compact_chat tool, ECA still completes the compaction and injects the chat's previous :last-summary as "The conversation was compacted/summarized, consider this summary:". The new summary, written as text, is discarded. The chat then continues from a summary of an older state, with no warning to the user or the model.

In a chat that was never compacted before, the injected summary is empty instead.

Environment

  • ECA 0.161.2 (also present on master at edca8608a)
  • Model: a local Qwen3.8-Flash-Next over an OpenAI-compatible endpoint (openai-chat API); probably reproducible with any model that sometimes ignores the tool instruction
  • Custom compact prompt (prompts.compact), which says "Call eca__compact_chat with the summary as its argument"; the default compact.md says the same
  • Auto-compaction during a running turn (autoCompactPercentage: 85)

What happened

One long chat, compacted three times by auto-compaction, same model and same compact prompt each time:

  1. Compactions 1 and 2: the model called compact_chat; the injected summary matched the tool argument. OK.
  2. Compaction 3 (mid-turn, right after a long subagent result): the model's reasoning ended with "Now, writing the summary." and it answered with the full summary (~12.8k chars) as a normal assistant message. No tool call, no malformed tool-call markup.
  3. ECA appended compact_marker and then injected the summary stored by compaction 2. That summary described a task from hours earlier, with obsolete state and instructions. The text answer from step 2 was not used.
  4. ECA resumed the turn ("Continue with the task. The previous user request was: …"), so the agent continued with the stale summary as its only memory of the session.

The persisted chat shows: assistant message with the new summary → compact_marker → user message whose text equals the chat's last-summary field (the old one).

Cause in the code

  • compact_chat is the only place that stores a summary: it sets :last-summary and :compact-done? true (src/eca/features/tools/chat.clj, compact-chat).
  • A mid-turn compaction finishes through compact-finished-side-effect! → lifecycle/complete-compact! → shared/compact-side-effect! (src/eca/features/chat.clj, trigger-compact!; src/eca/features/chat/lifecycle.clj, complete-compact!; src/eca/shared.clj, compact-side-effect!).
  • compact-side-effect! always reads (get-in db [:chats chat-id :last-summary]) and injects it. Nothing checks that compact_chat was called during this compaction; :compact-done? is only used to skip postRequest hooks (chat.clj, on-tools-called).
  • The finish side effect runs however the compact prompt ends, also when it ends with a text-only answer.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Use a model (or a fake OpenAI-compatible server) that answers the compact prompt with plain text and no tool call.
  2. In a chat that was compacted once before (so :last-summary holds summary A), trigger a second compaction (/compact or auto-compaction).
  3. The model answers with summary B as text.

Expected: the chat continues with summary B, or the compaction fails visibly.
Actual: the chat continues with summary A (or an empty summary, if there was no earlier compaction). Nothing tells the user.

Suggested fixes

Any of these would prevent the silent stale summary:

  1. Detect it: clear :last-summary (or record the compaction's start) before sending the compact prompt, and in compact-side-effect! treat "no compact_chat call in this compaction" as a failure.
  2. Recover: when the compact turn ends without the tool call, re-prompt once ("call eca__compact_chat with the summary you just wrote"), or use the final assistant text as the summary.
  3. Fail loudly: if neither works, do not append the marker; keep the history, and show a system message such as "Compaction failed: the model did not call compact_chat".

A test with a fake LLM that answers the compact prompt with text only would cover this.

Workaround

None on the user side, except watching for the problem: after a compaction, check that the injected summary describes the current work. Hooks cannot fix it: postCompact runs after the summary was chosen. A postCompact hook can only add context, for example re-inject the current task state from a file.

Lenguaje dominante
Clojure
Estrellas
1k
Forks
82
Merge medio
3 d 39 min
PR fusionados (30 d)
15

Preparar el entorno

Este proyecto no incluye contenedor de desarrollo, Dockerfile ni guía de contribución, así que la configuración corre por tu cuenta: empieza por su README y consulta nuestra guía para la primera contribución para los pasos generales.

Primeros pasos

  1. Lee el issue completo y luego la guía de contribución del proyecto.
  2. Comenta en el issue que vas a ocuparte — evita que dos personas hagan lo mismo.
  3. Haz un fork del repositorio y trabaja en una rama.
  4. Abre un pull request que haga referencia al número del issue.

Más de editor-code-assistant/eca

Todos los issues de editor-code-assistant/eca

Issues similares

Más issues de Clojure

Recibe los nuevos issues en tu correo

Un resumen breve de issues de GitHub para principiantes.