* polish: cut per-turn overhead, stabilize cache, add /new
Context economy
- Compaction: preserveLast 8->6, triggerRatio 0.8->0.7 (both copies in sync).
- System prompt: kill the "ELABORATE summary" directive; scale summary to
the work. Comment discipline moved into the core prompt for all model
families (was Anthropic-only); Minimax/DeepSeek/Qwen/etc. now get it.
- Token-budget regression test ratchets the fixed per-turn overhead (base
prompt + eager tool schemas) using the runtime's own estimator, so silent
prompt/schema growth fails CI.
Response quality
- defaultResponseStyle balanced->concise. Reversible via /style.
Tool discovery
- <available_skills> block in the system prompt lists installed skills
(name + one-line description) so the model loads the right one on the
first call instead of guessing and reading the failure. Budget-capped at
640 bytes with an "...and N more" fallback; renders nothing when no
skills are installed (byte-identical to prior prompt).
Session lifecycle
- /new starts a fresh session in place; previous session stays on disk and
is named in the confirmation for /resume. Guards against mid-run reset.
- /clear now notes that context persists and points to /new.
Performance & caching
- partitionTools no longer alpha-sorts the whole tools array every turn,
which inserted a loaded deferred tool mid-array and shifted the cached
prefix on every load. It now builds append-only regions
[eager sorted] + [tool_search] + [loaded deferred sorted] so a
mid-session load grows the tail instead of busting the eager prefix.
Regression test asserts the eager block precedes any loaded tool.
- /context now shows cache hit rate (flags low rate over >5 turns as a
possible unstable prefix) and rolling average turn latency with
time-to-first-token. Both reset on /new.
Measured baselines (auto-mode, no workspace): base prompt 3162 tokens,
eager tool schemas 2433 across 12 tools. Budget ceilings set ~10% above.
Deliberately deferred (need a decision): inverted safety-policy rewrite
(sandbox doesn't catch ~half the B-tier rules), core-tool/web_fetch
deferral (activation-semantics blocker), aggressive prompt slim.
* fix(tui): clear staged attachments + queued message on /new
CodeRabbit: startNewSession reset conversation/usage/latency state but not
the staged input (pendingImages, pendingImageLabels, pendingDocuments,
queuedMessage), which is only consumed at prompt-submit. Without clearing it,
the fresh session's first prompt silently inherited the previous session's
images/documents/queued text. Test now stages all four and asserts they clear.
* token efficiency: lossless cost accounting + minified file reads
Two complementary improvements to how Zero handles tokens.
ACCOUNTING — make cost measurement lossless and correct:
- Carry all five token dimensions end-to-end (input, cache-read, cache-write,
output, reasoning) in one Usage; add CacheWriteTokens (cache creation), which
the Anthropic adapter previously parsed then discarded.
- Price cache-writes at their premium rate (Anthropic 1.25x input, derived per
model). Regression-safe: a model without the rate bills cache-write at the
input rate exactly as before.
- Persist cache-read/cache-write/reasoning in EventUsage so `zero usage report`
reconstructs the SAME cost as the live tracker instead of over-pricing
cache-heavy sessions. A single EventUsagePayload writer is paired with the
reader so the JSON keys can't drift.
- Add a live context-window gauge to the status bar (used/window + percent,
graded green/amber/red) using the last request's input tokens.
REDUCTION — read_minified_file, a dense token-cheap file view:
- New internal/minify package + read_minified_file tool returning a comment-free,
line-number-free view: Go via the real go/parser AST; C/Java/CSS/SCSS/LESS/
Python via a string-aware comment lexer (handles strings, char literals,
triple-quotes, Java text blocks, Python f-strings incl. 3.12 same-quote
nesting). Every other language falls back to whitespace-only, so the stripper
can never corrupt content.
- ~32% fewer tokens on a realistic multi-file read; +~102 fixed tokens for the
tool schema, recovered many times over by a single subsystem read.
Tests: cache-write pricing + fallback, lossless persistence round-trip, the
context gauge, comment-stripping golden cases per language (comment-chars in
strings, Java text blocks, Python f-string nesting, CSS has no //), and the
unsupported-language safe fallback. gofmt / vet / build / -race all green.
* specialist: register read_minified_file in the tool registry + read-only sets
Smoke caught TestKnownToolNamesMatchCoreRegistry drifting once read_minified_file
joined the core read-only tools: the specialist tool allowlist (knownToolNames),
the read-only/edit/execute categories, and the read-only auto-approve set did not
list it. It is a read-only companion to read_file, so it belongs alongside
read_file in all of them; updated the default-allowlist test accordingly.
Anandan