Context Compaction: Keep Your Agents Sharp in Long Conversations

🎯 What is it?

Context Compaction is a new feature that automatically summarizes earlier parts of long conversations with your agents. Instead of losing context or hitting limits, Dust intelligently condenses the conversation history while preserving the essential information your agent needs to continue working effectively.

💡 Why is it useful?

During extended work sessions—like analyzing complex documents, iterating on code, or working through multi-step projects—conversations can become very long. Previously, this could degrade agent performance or force you to start a new conversation and lose your working context. Context Compaction solves this by maintaining quality throughout long interactions while keeping your full conversational context available in summarized form.

⚙ How does it work?

A new usage indicator appears in your input bar showing how much context is being used. The system guides you through three stages: at 30% usage, compaction becomes available; at 70%, you'll see a helpful reminder to compact; and at 80%, the system will pause new messages until you run compaction to ensure optimal performance.

✨ Concrete Use Cases

Here's how you could use it:

Complex Analysis Projects: You're working with an agent to analyze multiple quarterly reports over several hours. Instead of splitting your work across multiple conversations, Context Compaction lets you maintain the full analytical thread while summarizing earlier findings.

Iterative Development: You're collaborating with an agent on code development with many iterations and refinements. The conversation naturally grows long, but compaction preserves all your decisions and context without performance degradation.

📈 Benefits for you

Save time by never needing to restart conversations or re-explain context. Maintain better continuity in complex projects. Work confidently knowing your agent has access to the full conversation history in an optimized format.

🚀 How to access it?

Context Compaction is now available to all users. Simply watch for the context usage indicator in your input bar—when it appears, you'll be guided through the process automatically. Learn more in our documentation.