Bug Report

What happened

During automatic context compaction, the summary generation failed completely:

Summary unavailable due to context limits. Older messages were truncated.

This defeats the purpose of compaction — the context was too large, so it got compacted, but the compaction couldn't produce a summary because the context was too large.

Expected behavior

Compaction should always produce some summary, even if degraded:

• Iterative/chunked summarization for large contexts
• Partial summary of recent messages if full summary fails
• At minimum, preserve the last N messages verbatim as fallback

Impact

Without a summary, the agent loses all context about:

• What was being worked on
• Decisions made
• Pending tasks
• Important details from the conversation

The memoryFlush pre-compaction hook helps if the agent writes to files in time, but if summary generation fails, even that context cue is lost.

Related

• feat(compaction): Add post-compaction recovery turn #3452 addresses post-compaction recovery (reading saved memories after compaction)
• This issue is about the summary generation itself failing

Environment

• Clawdbot running on macOS
• Main session with extended conversation history
• Compaction triggered automatically