Sessions

Every conversation in Astonish is a session. Each session has a unique ID and is persisted as a JSONL file so it survives restarts. You can resume any past conversation at any time.

Managing sessions

List sessions

astonish sessions list

Alias: astonish sessions ls

Shows all sessions with timestamps and a message preview.

Show a session

astonish sessions show <id>

Display the full session trace. Session IDs can be abbreviated — Astonish matches by prefix.

Flag	Description
--json	JSON output for scripting
--tools-only	Only show tool calls
--verbose	Full tool args/results without truncation
--recursive	Include sub-agent sessions inline
--last 10	Show only the last N events

Delete sessions

Delete a single session:

astonish sessions delete <id>

Delete all sessions (prompts for confirmation):

astonish sessions clear

Session compaction

When a conversation grows too large for the model’s context window, Astonish automatically compacts older messages into a summary. This keeps the session usable without losing important context.

These settings can also be adjusted through Studio Settings > Sessions. In config.yaml:

sessions:
  compaction:
    enabled: true
    threshold: 0.8          # fraction of context window before compaction triggers
    preserve_recent: 4      # number of recent messages to keep intact

You can also trigger compaction manually with the /compact slash command.

Sub-sessions

When the agent delegates tasks to sub-agents, each sub-agent gets its own session linked to the parent. Use --recursive when viewing the parent session to see sub-agent traces inlined.

Storage

Sessions are stored in ~/.config/astonish/sessions/ by default. The location is configurable in your config file.