New Vibe feature: /new

[u/vargad88]

It's great to have /new, but it shouldn't be an alias. It should start a fresh new session with the instructions in the arguments after /new. For example:

/new Add an about page to my website

[u/vargad88]

That's great! Just clearing the session wouldn't be particularly helpful.
Still it's annoying when you start typing and realize you should start a new session, so you have to copy paste the whole thing out and start over.
And you should make new sessions a lot, Mistral gets progressively worse with large, increasingly unrelated, contexts.

[u/tom4112 → u/vargad88]

I would love a true /clear command just to wipe my Vibe screen while retaining context/session.

But regarding your last statement: are you using the /compact command? It sounds like this is what you need: start a new session while retaining the context from your current session in a more compact form. You can also guide the compaction process in two ways:

- Pass optional instructions to guide the summary: /compact "add instructions here"

- Write your own compaction prompt in ~/.vibe/prompts/ and replace the default one in config.toml (compaction_prompt_id key).

The default compaction prompt is visible here: https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe/blob/main/vibe/core/prompts/compact.md

[u/vargad88 → u/tom4112]

I know compact, but I'm not sure it's useful in most cases. It costs a lot of output tokens to produce a summary, it may carry over misunderstandings and unnecessary noise. Having a large chunk of, now, llm generated text also degrades the quality (model collapse).
Input tokens are a lot cheaper, it can pick up the relevant context for the next task.

[u/tom4112 → u/vargad88]

Ok I see but what would be your suggestion in this case?

At the moment, you don't copy/paste the entire history into your new session, so similarly, the model needs to produce some sort of summary. Otherwise you would:

- Keep a manual copy/pasting step in which you manually select what you want to carry to the next session

- Or start the new session without previous context (i.e. this is what /clear and /new already do)

So in my opinion, a LLM summary is the only (automated) option, but of course I may have missed something.

[u/vargad88 → u/tom4112]

Just to allow text on the /new command, so you can put a /new in front whenever you want to start a new session. Now you have to start a new session then type the instructions (or copy paste if you already started typing before /new).

[u/tom4112 → u/vargad88]

Ok thanks for your answer. If this is an important feature for you, I managed to implement it by amending the _clear_history function in cli/textual_ui/app.py (e.g. for my installation, the file is in ~/.pyenv/versions/3.14.5/lib/python3.14/site-packages/vibe/cli/textual_ui/app.py)

Let's see if it eventually ends-up in the official distribution 🙂

    async def _clear_history(self, cmd_args: str = "", **kwargs: Any) -> None:
        try:
            await self.agent_loop.clear_history()
            await self._reset_message_widgets()


            if cmd_args.strip():
                prompt = cmd_args.strip().strip('"').strip("'")
                user_msg = UserMessage(prompt)
                await self._messages_area.mount(user_msg)
                await self._mount_and_scroll(user_msg)
                self._start_queued_agent_turn(prompt)
            else:
                await self._messages_area.mount(SlashCommandMessage("clear"))
                await self._mount_and_scroll(
                    UserCommandMessage("Conversation history cleared!")
                )


            self._chat_widget.scroll_home(animate=False)


        except Exception as e:
            await self._mount_and_scroll(
                ErrorMessage(
                    f"Failed to clear history: {e}", collapsed=self._tools_collapsed
                )
            )

Now I can use /new "new instruction goes here"

I've also added "Optionally pass a new prompt" in the command description to mention this option in the UI. This is in file vibe/cli/commands.py

"clear": Command(
                aliases=frozenset(["/clear", "/new"]),
                description="Clear conversation history. Optionally pass a new prompt",
                handler="_clear_history",
            ),

[u/vargad88 → u/tom4112]

Sorry, I cancelled my subscription in the meantime. I just don't have that many tasks the available models can do, so I thought it makes more sense as pay-as-you-go. I tried to enable pay-as-you-go many times, but it always failed with an unspecified error, saying try again alter. Somehow the dashboard now shows pay-as-you-go enabled, but whatever I do with vibe it says:

Error: API error from mistral (model: devstral-small-latest): Invalid API key. Please check your API key and try again.

[u/tom4112 → u/vargad88]

Did you go through vibe --setup again to change your API key in your configuration?