Sessions and context

Sessions

Every conversation is saved as it goes, in .luxe/sessions/ inside the project. Quitting loses nothing.

Sessions… searches session titles and what was said in them, with a preview of the one under the cursor. /sessions opens it from the start screen or from inside a session. However you resume a session, it runs in its own worktree when it has one, and keeps what you had typed and the mode, model and thinking level you chose. /new keeps the session you leave, so you can come back to it.

Cost

The dock’s SESSION section shows context used, tokens and cost as you go. /cost shows the session’s cost with the tokens behind it, how much of the input was read from the provider’s cache, and, once more than one of them has spent something, the split between agent, review, compaction and cache warming. On a ChatGPT or Copilot plan, it shows what the usage would have cost at API prices, and what is left of the plan’s allowance when the provider reports it. A model that charges more for a long prompt, as models.dev lists for some Claude and Gemini models, is priced at the higher rate for each request past the threshold. A price you set in models.json replaces the catalog’s, tiers and all.

Keeping the cache warm

Anthropic keeps a cached prompt for five minutes after it was last read. A turn that waits longer than that, on a slow command, a permission prompt or a question, loses the cache, and the next request pays to write the whole conversation again: about $2 on a 400k-token Opus session. So while a turn runs, Luxe re-sends its last request with a one-token reply just before the five minutes are up. That costs a cache read, a tenth of the write it saves.

agent.cache_warming decides when:

A refresh goes out only when it is expected to save at least $0.05, so a short conversation is never refreshed. Between turns Luxe cannot know you will reply, so idle refreshes only a large conversation. On real sessions it lost money overall, which is why it is not the default. Refreshes are never sent on a subscription plan, or for an Anthropic model using a fixed thinking budget, whose cache would change on replay. Their cost shows under cache warming in /cost.

The other answer to a long pause is supports_long_cache_retention, which asks Anthropic to keep the cache for an hour; see Custom providers. It costs more on every turn instead of on each pause.

The context window

/context shows what fills the context window, largest first:

 GPT-5.6 Sol   18.5k of 1.1M · 2% used

  conversation     9.6k   52%
      `read` crat…-tui/src/statusline.rs   9.2k
  tool schemas     4.5k   25%
  instructions     2.8k   15%
  harness          1.5k    8%
  free             1.0M

The largest single items are named under a row, which is usually how you find a read or bash call that should have been narrower. The total is what the provider reported for the last request.

Compaction

When a conversation fills 90% of the usable window, Luxe summarizes it and carries on, keeping the most recent part word for word. The summary records the goal, constraints, progress, decisions, next steps and the files the session touched. You see a line like Compacted the conversation — 82k → 21k of context.

/compact summarizes now. Add what matters to steer the summary: /compact the API decisions. A conversation that already fits in what keep_recent keeps has nothing to summarize, and /compact says so.

Before summarizing, from 80% full, Luxe first replaces old tool output in the request with a short placeholder. The session file keeps everything; only what is sent changes.

To change when and how it happens:

{
  "compaction": {
    "auto": true,
    "at": 0.9,
    "keep_recent": 20000,
    "reserve": 20000,
    "prune": true,
    "summarizer": "anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5"
  }
}

This works in a project’s .luxe/config.json too, and so does agent.cache_warming, which a project can turn down but not up. The compaction settings in /settings apply the next time Luxe starts.

Long command output

Build, test and lint output is trimmed before the agent sees it. Errors, warnings, failing tests, file:line locations and exit codes are always kept; progress bars, color codes and repeated lines are not. When output is trimmed, the untouched text is saved under .luxe/artifacts/ (each stream whole up to 8 MB, or its first and last 4 MB past that) and its path is included, so the agent can read it if it needs to. Set LUXE_COMPRESS=0 to turn this off; output past the size limit is still cut and saved.

Searches and listings (grep, glob, git log) are capped the same way, with a note saying how many more results there are.