ACTIVE / %Context growth
Follow the active window turn by turn and distinguish material compactions from small usage changes.
GUIDE AI agent context monitoring
Context is a budget.
See where it goes.
Aether shows how coding-agent context grows across turns and estimates which sources account for each request. Repeated context is counted when the provider processes it again, while compacted history is replaced by the active summary.
01 The operational gap
Token totals tell you how much. Attribution tells you why.
A request can include the new user prompt, retained history, tool definitions and results, agent instructions, memory, hooks, documents, and provider runtime. Aether reconciles deterministic estimates to provider-native input totals and makes the approximation explicit.
02 What becomes visible
Useful signals.
One shared timeline.
TOKENS / SHAREInput attribution
Explore a left-to-right tree from the prompt root through categories and named sources.
ALL / REQUESTRepeated work
Count retained context each time it is processed across internal parent and agent requests.
LOCAL / PRIVATESafe labels
Use sanitized tool, document, and agent identifiers without exposing prompts, arguments, or contents.
03 Local pipeline
Native trails in.
Operational clarity out.
Read totals
Provider-emitted input and cache totals remain the authoritative root.
Reconstruct
A sequential ledger models retained history, tools, agents, and compaction boundaries.
Reconcile
Estimated categories scale deterministically to the native total and are marked with a tilde.
04 Practical questions
Know what Aether
does and does not do.
Is per-component token attribution exact?
No. Providers expose request totals, not every component total. Aether marks category allocations as deterministic estimates.
What happens after compaction?
The compact summary replaces earlier active history in the context ledger instead of being added on top of it.
Does Aether display prompt or document contents?
No. The attribution tree uses sanitized metadata and never renders raw prompts, arguments, schemas, memory, or documents.
05 Start observing
Three commands.
No instrumentation.
AETHER SETUPLOCAL SHELL
$
brew trust --formula connectchiragg/tap/aether$
brew install connectchiragg/tap/aether$
aether watch