openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature request: expose compacted summary content in the after_compaction plugin hook payload [2 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

The before_compaction / after_compaction plugin hooks are documented as observation-only — they let a plugin observe or annotate a compaction cycle, but the payload does not expose the compacted summary content. This makes it impossible for a plugin to act on what was distilled without reaching outside the documented hook contract.

(Please correct me if a later version already exposes this — this is based on the current /plugins/hooks docs.)

Use case

Knowledge-management / external-memory plugins want to route distilled knowledge into a downstream store at the moment of compaction — e.g. promoting durable facts out of a daily log into a curated long-term vault. To classify and route distilled items, the plugin needs the compacted summary text. Today the only way to obtain it is to locate and parse OpenClaw's internal compacted-log files on disk.

Why the filesystem workaround is fragile

• The on-disk log location and format are internal implementation details with no stability contract. A routine refactor can break a plugin silently — the hook still fires, the parse just returns nothing.
• Timing: after_compaction fires on the event; the plugin then reads the file, with no documented guarantee the summary write has flushed.
• The plugin must re-parse unstructured prose rather than consume structured output OpenClaw has already produced.

A payload field is a contract. A scraped internal file is not.

Proposed change

Include the compacted summary content in the after_compaction payload — e.g. a summary (or compactedText) field alongside the existing metadata. If exposing full content by default is a concern, a structured list of distilled items, or an opt-in flag at hook registration, would equally remove the need to scrape internal files.

Related

• #81925 — after_compaction emission edge case
• #8606 — hook event for context pruning (adjacent lifecycle point, different need)