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ADR-0013 — History reaches back 30 days, and the turn cap resets after 24 hours of silence ​

Status: accepted · Date: 2026-09-26

Context ​

There is one conversation row per contact, and its turn count never resets. After maxTurnsPerConversation (default 25) every message from that contact escalates before the model runs, permanently. History has no boundary in time either: the model receives the last ten turns however old they are.

The first draft ended a conversation after 24 hours of silence, turn cap and history together. That matched the callback's lifetime and would have bounded what a leaked secret could read. The operator rejected it: students come back 7 to 30 days later, often in reply to retargeting, and the agent should still know what they asked about. Once ADR-0012 binds history to a token held by ManyChat, a long history no longer widens what a forged request can read. The reason to keep history short is gone, while the reason to keep it long is the business's.

The reflexive fix for the cap is a rolling limit per contact per day, with history left alone. That is close to this decision, but it keeps the unbounded history.

Decision ​

The model receives the contact's last ten bound turns from the past historyDays (default 30), and the turn cap counts turns since the last gap of idleResetHours (default 24).

Consequences ​

  • A student returning after up to 30 days, or replying to a retargeting message, gets their context. A conversation older than that starts clean.
  • The cap bounds one stretch of conversation, not a contact's lifetime, so a returning student is never escalated for having talked before.
  • 30 days is the operator's statement of how long students take to come back (2026-09-26), not a measurement. 24 hours follows WhatsApp's customer-service window. Both are configurable.
  • Cost: transcripts must be kept at least historyDays, so any retention period starts from 30 days, not 7.
  • Cost: a 30-day history is more text in the prompt than a single day's. It is bounded by the ten-turn limit, not by time.
  • Revisit if evals show old turns misleading the agent, such as a price quoted a month ago being repeated after it changed, or if retention has to drop below 30 days.