#2 · the 🗜️ icon, what context compression keeps and what it drops
Hermes Wingtips #2
the 🗜️ icon, what context compression keeps and what it drops
this little emojy is the compression count: how many times Hermes auto-summarised the session to stay under the context limit, which kicks in around 50% full.
when compression occurs, it keeps your first 3 turns and your last 20, and summarises everything in between. a detail from the middle of a long session can then drop out, and the agent repeats work it already did, even though the opening goal and the recent turns are intact.
three levers when it bites, all in config.yaml, hot-reloading on a running gateway:
- protect_last_n keeps more recent turns uncompressed
- auxiliary.compression.model points the summariser at a cheap fast model so it does not burn main-model tokens
- model.context_length raises the ceiling so it fires later.
https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/developer-guide/context-compression-and-caching