Create projectless chat sessions under a managed, date-scoped Chats directory and clean abandoned or deleted session folders. Add Chats to sidebar state, startup cache, shared context, and Electron Mini Chat while keeping VS Code project-only. Resolve managed chat directories to one server-side memory owner and document the runtime contracts.
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Session Knowledge
What a session must be told about the project — that session's pinned notes and plans, and the index of what the agent has remembered — and whether it has been told yet.
Why it is here and not in the UI
The client used to own this: it assembled the text, decided when to send it, and remembered what it had sent in a module-scoped map. Two consequences followed.
A session started without a UI got nothing at all. Scheduled tasks and sessions the agent dispatches build their prompts on the server and never touch the browser, so pinned context and the memory index simply did not exist for them.
And a tab's memory of what it sent survives compaction, while the conversation does not. After a summary the agent no longer holds the block, but the tab goes on believing it does and never sends it again.
The contract
session.metadata.openchamber.project_context_pins owns the note and plan ids
attached to that session. Pins never come from project-wide note or plan state.
A new-session draft passes its pins into this metadata when its first message
creates the session.
Directories beneath the managed ~/.config/openchamber/chats root resolve to that root before project context and project memory are read. Every ordinary chat therefore shares one Chats knowledge owner instead of creating an unreachable context store for each dated session directory.
session.metadata.openchamber.knowledge_context_delivered holds the signature
of what the session is carrying. It lives with the session, so it survives the
tab closing and is visible to every sender, including the ones with no tab.
The signature covers content revisions, not just identity: editing a pinned note must re-send it, not merely renaming one.
Three moments, two deliveries
| Moment | Delivery |
|---|---|
| A message from the UI | synthetic part on that message |
| A scheduled task, a session the agent dispatched | synthetic part on that prompt |
| After compaction | its own prompt_async, alongside the pinned messages |
The first two attach to an outgoing message because there is one. Compaction has
none, which is why it re-sends on its own — and it travels with
context-obligatory's pinned messages in a single turn, since two synthetic
messages back to back read as the agent being interrupted twice.
Failure behaviour
Nothing here may fail a send. A message without its background costs the agent some context; a failed send costs the user their message. Every caller treats an error as "no block this time".
A source that will not load never blanks the rest: an unreadable memory store still delivers the pinned notes. A memory scope that failed to load is left out rather than indexed as empty, which would teach the agent to store again what it already has.
Delivery is recorded only after the send is accepted. Recording it when the text is handed over would leave a failed send believing the agent had context it never received.
Entries that read as instructions
Memory is the one place where text from outside can settle permanently. The agent reads a page, decides a line is worth keeping, saves it — and from then on it rides into every session in every project. An injection anywhere else lives for one conversation.
agent-memory/threat-patterns scans on write and again on every read, so an
entry written before a pattern existed, or edited on disk since, is judged now.
A match never deletes: the entry is stored, flagged, kept out of what sessions
are told, and shown in the panel with a warning. Silently dropping it would hide
the attempt from the only person able to judge it.
Patterns, not a model — this runs on every index build. That buys the blunt cases only, which is the honest expectation.
Shipping dark
Agent memory is complete but unreleased. OPENCHAMBER_MEMORY_ENABLE decides
whether it exists in a given process at all: unset, there is no tool, no routes,
no session index, no settings row and no panel tab — absent rather than switched
off, which would invite turning on something never announced. The setting itself
also defaults to off, so setting the variable does not enable memory by itself.
Pinned notes and plans are unaffected by the memory switch and remain scoped to the session that pinned them.