Long sessions & rolling history
How WritersRoom handles very long cockpit sessions and what to expect when history compression kicks in.
A single WritersRoom project can have hundreds of cockpit exchanges across many sessions. As a session grows, loading the complete conversation history would eventually overflow the AI's context window. WritersRoom handles this automatically through rolling history compression — without any action from you, and without losing the substance of what you've built.
How rolling history compression works
Normal sessions
For most sessions, the complete exchange history is loaded. You won't see any compression happening — responses are fully aware of everything said earlier in the session.
When sessions grow long
When a session's message count reaches a threshold, the system generates a structured summary of the older exchanges — capturing key decisions, character agreements, plot points, and creative direction — and replaces the raw history with that summary in new requests.
What the summary captures
The rolling summary preserves: confirmed creative decisions, character and world facts that emerged in conversation, any explicit instructions you gave the AI about tone or approach, and the broad arc of the discussion. Fine-grained phrasing from early exchanges may not be preserved.
Where to see it
The session info panel (click the ⓘ icon in the cockpit header) shows the message count and whether a summary is active. You can read the current summary to verify what's been preserved.
Saved messages and retention
Compression only affects what's sent to the AI in new requests — saved messages remain available while their session is retained in the session history panel. You can scroll back to any earlier exchange at any time.
Practical implication: don't worry about session length
Very long sessions work well. The summary mechanism is designed to preserve creative decisions and avoid repeating resolved discussions. If you ever feel the AI has forgotten something important, re-stating it explicitly in your next message immediately updates its working context.
Does starting a new session help?
For a fresh perspective on a specific problem, yes — a new session lets you approach something without the weight of a long conversation. But don't start new sessions just to avoid compression; the summary mechanism handles long sessions well.
Can I force a history summary?
Not manually — the summary is triggered automatically when sessions reach the compression threshold. Your Project Memory is a better long-term store for critical facts: save important AI outputs as memory objects so they're stored separately from a session's rolling summary, with selection for AI use still subject to context budgets.