Solo can generate a sidebar-visible, compact summary after recent activity in an agent or terminal. This gives you a quick way to catch up without re-reading the full output.
What it does
Auto-summarization sends a compact rendered-text snapshot to the summarizer, not the full raw transcript. For PTY-backed agents and terminals, Solo reconstructs recent visible terminal rows plus recent history.
The summarizer is asked for a short summary plus a state classification — whether the agent looks idle, waiting for permission, thinking, actively working, or stopped on an error.
Claude recaps
Claude Code can print its own one-line recap at the end of a turn. When a Claude agent prints a recap line, Solo uses that text directly as the process summary — no summarizer call is needed, and this works even when auto-summarization is not set up.
Solo keeps the most recent complete recap and truncates very long recaps to fit the summary line. Recaps only apply to Claude agents; if you disable recaps in Claude Code's own /config, Solo falls back to the summarizer.
Setup
Open Settings → Agents → Auto-summarization and choose a Summarizer tool. Auto-summarization is disabled until a tool is selected.
Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Copilot can run summaries natively — select one of them and it works without extra setup. Custom (generic) tools need a Headless command configured in the agent tool editor before they can summarize. Amp, OpenCode, Kimi, and Antigravity don't have a native summarizer in Solo; to use one of those CLIs for summaries, add it as a custom tool with a headless command.
The model field is passed through the selected tool's model flag when Solo uses a native summarizer. Current native defaults are:
- Claude:
sonnet - Codex:
gpt-5-codex - Gemini:
flash-lite - Copilot:
auto
Session isolation
Native summarizer runs are one-off headless invocations. Solo explicitly keeps Claude and Codex summary calls out of their normal resume histories:
- Claude summaries run with session persistence disabled, so headless summary calls never show up in Claude Code's resume list.
- Codex summaries run as ephemeral sessions, so they are not saved to Codex's resume list.
Gemini and Copilot summaries also run as one-off headless calls, but Solo does not add a provider-specific history-isolation flag for them. Whether those calls appear in resume history is controlled by the provider CLI.
Your interactive agent sessions are unaffected — the summarizer reads a snapshot of the terminal output and never writes into the conversation you're having with an agent.
Cadence and triggers
The cadence setting is the minimum time between summary attempts for the same process. The available cadences are 15 sec, 30 sec, and 1 min.
Solo also waits for recent activity before requesting a summary:
- A process becomes eligible for summaries only after you've typed into it.
- A brief quiet window after output stops triggers a summary.
- Long-running continuous output can still produce periodic summaries, based on the selected cadence.
- If there is too little recent output to be worth summarizing, the attempt is skipped.
To save tokens, agent-spawned subagents are skipped for automatic summaries. Their parent group can still show its own summary.
Testing
Use Test in the Auto-summarization settings to run the selected summarizer directly. The health check passes only when the tool replies with solo okay.
Notes
Summaries are a context aid, not a replacement for the full terminal output or chat transcript when you need exact details.