v0.22.0

v0.22.0 — 🎊Historian v2🎊, a self-tuning history cache, and node:sqlite

This is the largest release since Magic Context launched. The history engine has been rebuilt from the ground up, the SQLite backend no longer needs a native module, two recall features are now on by default, and the Pi plugin reaches full behavioral parity with OpenCode.

Upgrading an existing session? Sessions compacted by the old historian keep working, but you'll be prompted once to upgrade them to the new format for better fidelity and cache stability. See Upgrading below.

Headline: Historian v2 and a self-tuning history cache > pure magic...

The old design summarized history into a single flat block and ran a separate LLM "compressor" pass to keep it small. That's gone. The new engine is deterministic, cheaper, and far more cache-friendly.

Tiered compartments. Every compartment the historian writes now carries four paraphrase tiers — from a verbose P1 (treated like "the last 12 hours," kept near-verbatim) down to a P4 anchor (just enough to recognize and re-find it). The historian also scores each compartment's importance as a decay rate: how long this needs to stay in high-fidelity memory.

Deterministic decay rendering — no more compressor LLM. Instead of paying a model to re-compress old history, a math function picks the right tier for each compartment on every render, from its age, its importance, and how much history budget you currently have. As a compartment ages or as budget tightens, it gracefully demotes P1 → P2 → P3 → P4, oldest-first. When your model's context window is large, history renders richer; when it's tight, it renders leaner — automatically, with zero LLM cost.

A two-slot history layout that keeps your cache warm. History now renders into two synthetic message slots:

• A stable baseline holding project docs, your user profile, and the decayed compartment history — treated like a frozen prefix that does not change on routine turns, so its prompt-cache bytes persist.
• A small volatile delta holding only what's new since the last baseline refresh — new compartments, new memories, and your pinned key files.

The practical effect: on a steady working day, the large stable prefix stays cached until TTL expires or system promopt changes, and only the small delta moves. Fewer surprise cache-misses, much lower cost on long sessions.

Memory edits no longer bust your cache. When the agent (or you) edits, archives, or merges a memory mid-session, that change now surfaces as a compact correction in the volatile delta instead of forcing the entire stable baseline to re-render. The agent sees the corrected state immediately; the expensive prefix stays put until the next natural refresh.

No more native SQLite module

The non-Bun runtimes (Pi on Node, OpenCode Desktop on Electron) used to depend on better-sqlite3 — a native module that needed a per-platform prebuild and, on Desktop, a runtime binary download with an ABI probe. That whole path is gone. Magic Context now uses the built-in node:sqlite on Node and Electron, and bun:sqlite under Bun.

No native module, no prebuild, no download, nothing to go wrong on install. If you ever hit better_sqlite3.node load failures or Electron ABI mismatches, those are eliminated.

Two recall features now on by default

Both were previously opt-in experiments and are now stable and on by default. Each can be turned off independently.

• Temporal awareness — the agent sees elapsed-time markers (e.g. +2h 15m) between messages and dated compartments, so it understands when things happened. Opt out with temporal_awareness: { enabled: false }.
• Auto-search hints — each turn, a background ctx_search quietly whispers a compact "vague recall" when something relevant exists in your memories, past conversation, or git history. No full content is injected — just a nudge to look. Opt out with memory: { auto_search: { enabled: false } }.

Experimental config graduated

The experimental.* namespace is retired. Settings moved to stable homes, and doctor migrates your existing config automatically (your opt-ins and opt-outs are preserved):

Old	New	Default
experimental.temporal_awareness	temporal_awareness	on
experimental.auto_search	memory.auto_search	on
experimental.git_commit_indexing	memory.git_commit_indexing	off
experimental.caveman_text_compression	caveman_text_compression	off

Collapsible sidebar

The TUI sidebar can now be collapsed (click the header). Collapsed, it keeps the context progress bar plus three compact summary lines — Historian state, Memories, and Status (compartment / queued-op / note counts) — for a glanceable view that takes minimal vertical space.

Pi reaches full parity with OpenCode

The Pi plugin went through an extensive parity sweep and now mirrors OpenCode's behavior across the board: the two-slot history layout, deterministic decay rendering, memory supersede-delta, the upgrade flow, detached (non-blocking) recomp/upgrade, model-fallback chains, and stable message-identity handling. A tracked PARITY.md now documents every intentional difference between the two harnesses so they don't drift.

Performance

• Transform hot path. A per-pass work-metrics computation was scanning the full assistant-message history on every turn; on large sessions that alone cost ~250ms per pass. It's now lazy and incremental — computed only when the sidebar asks for it. On a large session the post-transform phase dropped from ~240ms to a few milliseconds.
• Dashboard. Database and filesystem reads moved off the UI thread, the project dropdown is cached for instant History re-entry, and the session list no longer scans the full message table just to show a count. Navigating the dashboard is now snappy even on large databases.
• Tunable SQLite. New optional sqlite.cache_size_mb and sqlite.mmap_size_mb knobs, plus a periodic PRAGMA optimize.

Dashboard

• Compartment view upgraded to the v2 model — per-tier (P1–P4) inspection, importance, and episode-type badges.
• New expandable Memory Changes drill-down on dreamer runs — see exactly which memories were written, archived, or merged.
• Token breakdown corrected to measure the actual injected bytes (Docs and User Profile are now their own categories).

Security and correctness hardening

This release folded in a large multi-round audit sweep across both harnesses and the dashboard. Highlights:

• Memory config bypass fixed — disabling the memory store no longer leaks memories into the prompt via a fallback path.
• Local RPC server now requires a per-process bearer token and drops wildcard CORS, so a stray local process can't drive the side-effecting endpoints.
• Resumed-session project resolution — note nudges and auto-search now resolve the session's project, not the launch directory, so opencode -s from another repo behaves correctly.
• More than 50 additional bugfixes across the plugin, Pi, and dashboard — migration collision handling, the upgrade flow, key-file selection, dashboard memory editing, and many more.

Upgrade

This release adds database migrations that apply automatically on first start. Your data is migrated in place.

# OpenCode
npx @cortexkit/magic-context@latest doctor

# Pi (requires Pi >= 0.74)
npx @cortexkit/magic-context@latest setup --harness pi

Upgrading old compartments. Sessions that were compacted by the previous historian remain fully usable, but their compartments are in the old flat format. When you open such a session you'll be prompted once to upgrade it — this reprocesses its history with the new historian into the tiered format (it can take a while on large sessions, and runs without blocking your work). You can also trigger it manually:

/ctx-session-upgrade

Upgrading is optional but recommended — un-upgraded sessions render in a degraded single-tier mode.