Preserve the objective, current state, settled decisions, ownership, unfinished work, approvals, constraints and relevant verification. Keep explicit pauses. Reconcile delayed messages against completed work; drop stale plans and tool dumps.
Update existing private checkpoint/coordination notes that this session owns, preserving collaborators' work. Use established locations rather than inventing another handoff. If no notes exist, preserve a concise checkpoint in the current conversation; create a private note only when useful and verify it stays out of version control. Never put private task details into this public skill.
Read back changed notes and confirm briefly that the checkpoint is preserved. Name the native compaction command the user can now run. For Codex CLI, say You can run /compact now. Do not ask the user to paste preservation instructions first, and do not claim that you pasted anything into their prompt box.
Stop and wait for the user. Clippy does not execute compaction, type into prompts, queue a self-message, restart a session, launch a replacement agent or change global compaction settings. Preserved notes are not proof that compaction ran.

Explicit clipboard requests

If the user specifically asks for clipboard output, provide a tailored keep-list as an additional output. Prefer fewer than 500 characters, without Markdown fences or a trailing newline. Copy using a native clipboard tool; on macOS pass text to pbcopy over stdin and compare pbpaste exactly, without printing prior clipboard contents. Do not install utilities. If copying fails, report it and show the payload.

Use the harness's verified input format. For inline-capable commands, a tailored /compact Preserve ... is appropriate. Codex CLI does not accept inline compaction instructions: use a normal preservation message if the user explicitly wants that workflow, and explain that /compact is a separate command. This optional workflow must not replace direct checkpoint preservation by default.

Reuse verified harness knowledge; check local help/source or official documentation only when uncertain. Verified 2026-10-31: Codex's SlashCommand::supports_inline_args excludes Compact, and installed version 0.166.0 accepts only threadId in ThreadCompactStartParams. The CLI parser is the relevant source; Responses API compaction instructions are a different interface. Recheck if a later CLI documents support for custom inline instructions.

For a fresh replacement conversation, use the available handoff workflow instead.

clippy

Clippy