# Chats and context

A chat is a desk, not an archive. The agent re-reads everything in it at every step: the longer the conversation, the more attention goes to old material and the higher the chance yesterday's report bleeds into today's.

## One task, one chat

- New topic — the **New chat** button in the left panel.
- The sign it is time: you write "forget the previous thing", "now about something else", "let's start over".
- A sales report and a supplier contract are two chats, even if you need both today.
- Nothing is lost: every chat stays in history and can be continued later.

## If the conversation did grow long

The agent will compact it on its own — during the run you will see the **Compacting context** step. Your messages and the conclusions reached are kept; the details of old exports are not.

**Signs of an overloaded chat**
Answers get slower, the agent mixes up periods and files, or returns to a task you closed earlier. Starting a new chat with a short summary in the first message is faster than untangling the long one.

## The price warning

Some models have a **price step**: a request longer than, say, 272 thousand tokens is billed at double the rate. It is not one call that gets dearer but every call until the end of the turn: the agent re-reads the whole conversation at every step, and its full size lands on the bill again and again.

That is why a bar rises above the input ahead of time: **“… % of context left until auto-compact”**. It appears when about a tenth of the window is left before the step, while there is still time to compact cheaply. Once the step is crossed, the bar says so plainly: **“Context is over the auto-compact threshold”**.

What to do:

- press **“Compact context”** in that bar or send the `/compact` command — the conversation folds into a summary, the same as the automatic “Compacting context” step, and the turn continues at the base rate;
- wait for the answer to finish if the agent is working right now: the button is disabled during a turn and becomes available after it;
- if the topic is finished anyway, [start a new chat](#what-to-carry-into-the-new-chat) — that is the cheapest option.

Nothing is lost: your messages and conclusions stay in the summary, and the whole chat stays in history.

## What to carry into the new chat

Give the agent the minimum the task needs:

- the file itself — [attach it again](/help/files), that is more reliable than "the file above";
- one paragraph of conclusions from the previous conversation, if they matter;
- anything that should always apply — [write it to memory](/help/memory), then you never repeat it again.

## Incognito mode

**Incognito mode** is for a one-off sensitive question: the chat is not saved to history and nothing is written to memory. It is not meant for everyday work, since the agent cannot build on that conversation later.