compact

A command that replaces older closed issues with shorter summaries to reduce database size.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to preview or compact eligible closed issues, compact a specific issue, force compaction, or view size statistics. Full history can be viewed from Git when available.
Why use it?
It keeps long-running projects smaller, but permanently discards the original issue content from the database.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/gastownhall/beads/compact
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gastownhall/beads
Per session 8 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 277 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00008 $0.00277
Opus 5 $0.00004 $0.00138
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00055
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00028

Measured yesterday against content hash 520441750532, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

compact scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • compact — 92% identical, 4 lines differ
plugins/beads/skills/beads/commands/compact.md · 32 lines

What it actually says

Reduce database size by summarizing closed issues no longer actively referenced.

Compaction Tiers

  • Tier 1: Semantic compression (30+ days closed, ~70% size reduction)
  • Tier 2: Ultra compression (90+ days closed) — planned, not yet implemented

Usage

  • Preview candidates: bd admin compact --dry-run
  • Compact all eligible: bd admin compact --all
  • Compact specific issue: bd admin compact --id bd-42
  • Force compact: bd admin compact --id bd-42 --force (bypass age checks)
  • View statistics: bd admin compact --stats

Options

  • --tier: Choose compaction tier (1 or 2, default: 1)
  • --workers: Parallel workers (default: 5)
  • --batch-size: Issues per batch (default: 10)

Important

This is permanent graceful decay - original content is discarded. Use bd restore <id> to view full history from git if needed.

Useful for long-running projects to keep database size manageable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 32 lines · 8 tokens per session scan A 520441750532

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compact is a command published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/beads (26,754 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 8 tokens to every session and 277 once invoked, about $0.0000 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.