Sessions and context
How chat memory works — what's kept, what's pruned, and how to keep long threads useful.
A chat session is a list of turns. Each turn includes the user message, any attachments, and the assistant’s reply (including tool calls and tool results). The whole list is sent to the model on every turn — that’s how it “remembers”.
Token budget
Models have finite context windows. As a thread grows, you start paying more per turn and eventually exceed the model’s window. Cocobox manages this automatically:
- Compaction — when the conversation exceeds 70% of the model’s context, Cocobox summarizes the oldest turns into a compact “session brief”. The brief is kept; the verbatim turns are dropped from the model’s view (you still see them in the UI).
- Attachment trimming — large result sets attached early in the chat are replaced with a short row-count summary as the chat grows.
- Tool-result trimming — verbose tool outputs are truncated; the model can re-invoke a tool to see the full result.
You can force a compaction manually with /compact or skip it with /keep-all (you’ll just hit the window faster).
Branching
A chat thread is linear by default. To explore an alternative direction without polluting the main thread, branch: right-click any user message → “Branch from here”. A new chat starts with the conversation up to that point as its preamble. The original thread is unchanged.
Pinned attachments
If there’s a piece of context you want present in every turn — a glossary, a constraint, a “we use snake_case” reminder — pin it. Pinned attachments are never compacted away.
Sharing
A chat can be shared with workspace members. They’ll see the same conversation; if they ask a follow-up, the model handles it like any other turn. Useful for handing off an investigation.
Shared chats are read-only by default; the owner can grant write access.
Retention
Chat retention follows your plan:
| Plan | Retention |
|---|---|
| Trial | 30 days |
| Starter | 90 days |
| Team / Enterprise | Indefinite |
Delete a chat at any time → both the UI thread and the underlying logs are scheduled for deletion within 24h.
Search
Cmd/Ctrl + K searches across all your chats: titles, message bodies, tool calls, and results. Filters: model:tambor, connection:prod, before:2026-04-01.
Best practices
- Title every long chat. Click the title at the top → write a name. Default auto-titles are okay; explicit titles are better when you’ll come back next week.
- Branch instead of restarting. If you’re 30 turns deep on the wrong assumption, branch from turn 5 — keep the rest as reference.
- Attach sparingly. Don’t dump entire schemas if only 3 tables matter. Pin the 3.