Compact external agent transcripts for --full/--verbose display

[blackgirlbytes]

https://entire.io/gh/entireio/cli/trails/561

What

entire checkpoint explain --full / --verbose rendered "(failed to parse transcript)" for external agents (goose, amp): the transcript display path only tries built-in agent parsers and stored compact JSONL, and never asks the external agent binary to convert its native transcript — unlike the summary path, which already routes through CompactTranscript.

This runs stored external-agent transcripts through the same compaction before the transcript section renders, in both the committed-checkpoint path and the temporary-checkpoint path. maybeCompactExternalTranscriptForSummary is renamed to maybeCompactExternalTranscript to reflect the second caller. The helper is a no-op for transcripts the built-in parsers already understand, and returns input unchanged when no compactor is available — so built-in agents are unaffected.

Why

External agents that declare compact_transcript (amp, and now goose via entireio/external-agents#39) store transcripts in their native format. Summaries work because the summary path compacts; the display path was left behind, so the documented --full ("Parsed full transcript — all prompts/responses from entire session") shows a parse failure instead of the conversation.

Testing

• go test ./cmd/entire/cli -run 'Compact|Transcript|Explain' passes
• Manually verified against a real goose checkpoint: before — "(failed to parse transcript)"; after — full conversation renders ([User]/[Assistant] turns + [Tool] calls)

Related

• Add entire-agent-goose: Goose external agent external-agents#39 (entire-agent-goose)
• entirehq/entire.io#2354 (web rendering for goose)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR fixes entire checkpoint explain --full/--verbose for external agents (e.g., amp/goose) by routing stored native transcripts through the external agent’s compact-transcript capability so the transcript rendering pipeline can parse and display the conversation.

Changes:

• Compact external-agent transcripts before transcript rendering for committed checkpoints when --full/--verbose is used.
• Reuse the same compaction helper for summary generation and transcript display (maybeCompactExternalTranscript rename + new call sites).
• Apply the same compaction behavior in the temporary-checkpoint explain path.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
cmd/entire/cli/explain.go	Adds external transcript compaction to the --full/--verbose transcript rendering paths; renames helper for shared use.
cmd/entire/cli/explain_test.go	Updates helper invocation in the existing external-compaction redaction test.

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (2)

cmd/entire/cli/explain.go:963

• maybeCompactExternalTranscript is now used for transcript display as well as summary generation, but the temp file pattern and debug log messages inside the helper still refer specifically to “summary”. This makes logs harder to interpret when compaction is triggered by --full/--verbose rendering.

Consider renaming these strings (and the temp file pattern) to be transcript-display/compaction generic (e.g., "entire-compact-transcript-*" and "external transcript compaction …").

func maybeCompactExternalTranscript(ctx context.Context, scopedTranscript []byte, agentType types.AgentType) []byte {
	if transcriptHasSummaryContent(scopedTranscript, agentType) {
		return scopedTranscript
	}

cmd/entire/cli/explain_test.go:900

• The existing external-compaction test only asserts redaction. Since the helper is now also relied on to make --full/--verbose transcript rendering parseable for external agents, add an assertion that the compacted bytes can actually be rendered by the transcript display path (i.e., formatTranscriptBytes should not return "(failed to parse transcript)" and should contain formatted turns like "[User]").

	got := maybeCompactExternalTranscript(ctx, []byte("not-json"), kind)
	if strings.Contains(string(got), secret) {
		t.Fatalf("external compact transcript was not redacted: %s", got)
	}
	if !strings.Contains(string(got), redact.RedactedPlaceholder) {
		t.Fatalf("expected redacted compact transcript, got: %s", got)
	}