Context-Window Self-Clearing

Overview

The context-window-self-clearing skill preserves Datarim task continuity while orchestrated Claude Code or Codex sessions compact or clear their context window. It applies only to orchestrator-launched sessions that explicitly enable context-window automation — it is default-off.

Key Concepts

• Checkpoint before reset — the active task snapshot is read first; the task-description path, last completed snapshot stage, snapshot path, and snapshot digest are bound into a private transaction before any reset instruction is sent.
• Deterministic pressure thresholds — two arms, and the stricter verdict wins. The primary absolute arm counts working-set tokens: below 200,000 is no_op, 200,000–279,999 is selective_drop (compaction), 280,000 and above is full_clear (overridable via DR_CTX_SOFT_TOKENS / DR_CTX_HARD_TOKENS). The retained percentage arm: below 75% is no_op, 75–89% is selective_drop, 90–100% is full_clear. A percentage alone hides its denominator, so a larger window is never a licence to accumulate more; a missing token count is a gap to close, not evidence of low pressure. A policy may select a mode only at or above its declared floor, never below 50.
• Fixed instructions only — selective compaction and full clear use a closed set of reset instructions; nothing is improvised per session.
• Transactional continuity — after a full clear the session revalidates the snapshot digest and resumes via /dr-next; after compaction a matching post-compact marker completes the transaction exactly once. A failed or crashed claim is ambiguous and is reconciled, never replayed automatically.
• Trust boundary — HMAC tags protect private-state integrity, ordering, replay, and pane correlation; automation requires the runtime trust settings to be explicitly enabled. Raw pane, prompt, assistant, notify, or rollout content is never persisted.

Canonical source

Full contract in the Datarim repo: skills/context-window-self-clearing/SKILL.md. Continuity source of truth: the snapshot-replay skill.