wtf is smartcompact?

smartcompact is a plugin for Claude Code, an AI coding assistant that works in a terminal. Long AI coding conversations eventually get too big to keep in the assistant's memory, so the tool periodically "compacts" the conversation, shrinking it down into a summary. The problem this project addresses is that each round of compacting summarizes an already shortened summary, so important details, like why an approach was abandoned or an instruction the user gave earlier, can quietly disappear a few rounds later. Other tools try to solve this automatically, letting the AI itself decide what to keep. smartcompact takes a different approach: it lets the person using the assistant choose. Before compacting happens, it shows the user specific moments from the current conversation, such as a result reached, a decision that was made and why, or a rule the user asked the assistant to follow, and asks which of those to save. Whatever the user picks gets written to a file and is automatically reinserted into the conversation every time it gets compacted or resumed, regardless of what the automatic summarizer decides to keep or drop. Installing it uses Claude Code's own plugin system with two commands, and no manual configuration file editing is required. Once installed, a user runs a command to trigger the pinning process, gets asked which pieces of the conversation to keep, and is handed a ready-made compaction command to paste in. There is also a way to search back through the full, untouched conversation history to recover details that were not pinned or kept. Behind the scenes, the tool keeps pinned notes in a small file tied to the current conversation session, and separately encourages the summarizer to keep an ongoing list of firm decisions apart from the parts of the conversation that can be freely re-summarized. It runs with a single command call to keep things fast at the exact moment when the conversation is largest and slowest to process. Nothing is sent over the network or to any outside service, everything stays on the user's own machine. This tool is meant for developers who use Claude Code regularly for long, complex coding sessions and want more control over what the assistant remembers.