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Comment by yumraj

1 day ago

> Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead

I don’t understand this. I frequently have long breaks. I never want to clear or even compact because I don’t want to lose the conversations that I’ve had and the context. Clearing etc causes other issues like I have to restate everything at times and it misses things. I do try to update the memory which helps. I wish there was a better solution than a time bound cache

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yumraj

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cowwoc2020  21 hours ago

Makes me wish that shortly before the server-side expiration, we could save the cache on the client-side, indefinitely.

But my understanding is that we're talking about ~60GB of data per session, so it sounds unrealistic to do...

  • porridgeraisin  1 hour ago

    I wanted this as well. Even asked about it at an openai talk. Basically a way to get the KV cache to the client (they can encrypt it if they care about me REing it, make a compressed latent if they don't wanna egress 20GB, whatever, I'm fine with a black box) so that I can load it later and avoid these cache misses.

    I think the primary reason they cannot do this is that they change the memory and communication layouts in their serving stack rather aggressively. And naturally keeping the KV cache portable across all such layouts is a very difficult task. So you'd have to version the cache down to a specific deployment, and invalidate it the moment anything even small changes. So giving the user a handle to the cache sort of prevents you from making large changes to memory layout. Which is I suppose not that enticing. Also, client side KV caches are only meaningful in today's 1M contexts. Few y back it wasn't necessary, since just recomputing would be better for everybody.

    To be clear, I don't mean they send it along with every request. Rather, they do their current TTL cache, and then when I'm at the end of a session, I request it in one shot and then close the session. And it doesn't have to come to the literal client, they can egress it to a storage service that we pay for, whatever. But ya the compat problem makes it all a non starter.

  • yumraj  16 hours ago

    Where are you getting 60GB from? It shouldn’t be that large.

    But yes, would love to save context/cache such that it can be played back/referred to if needed.

    /compact is a little black box that I just have to trust that is keeping the important bits.