> I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs
The UI could indicate this by showing a timer before context is dumped.
> I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs
The UI could indicate this by showing a timer before context is dumped.
a countdown clock telling you that you should talk to the model again before your streak expires? that's the kind of UX i'd expect from an F2P mobile game or an abandoned shopping cart nag notification
Well sure if you put it that way, they're similar. But it's either you don't see it and you get surprised by increased quota usage, or you do see it and you know what it means. Bonus points if they let you turn it off.
No need to gamify it. It's just UI.
Plenty of room for a middle ground, like a static timestamp per session that shows expiration time, without the distraction of a constantly changing UI element.
Why not an automated ping message that's cheap for the model to respond to?
Because the cache is held on anthropics side, and they aren't going to hold your context in cache indefinitely.
Yes!! A UI widget that shows how far along on the prompt cache eviction timelines we are would be great.
That sounds stressful.
But perhaps Claude Code could detect that you're actively working on this stuff (like typing a prompt or accessing the files modified by the session), and send keep-cache-alive pings based on that? Presumably these pings could be pretty cheap, as the kv-cache wouldn't need to be loaded back into VRAM for this. If that would work reliably, cache expiry timeouts could be more aggressive (5 min instead of an hour).
I tried to hack the statusline to show this but when i tried, i don't think the api gave that info. I'd love if they let us have more variables to access in the statusline.