Auto-Archive

Coder Agents automatically archives long-inactive conversations so they drop out of active chat lists without any user intervention. Archived conversations are still visible (and can be unarchived) until they age out of the separate retention window, at which point they are purged.

How it works

A background process runs approximately every 10 minutes. On each tick it scans the chat database for root conversations whose most recent non-deleted message is older than the configured auto-archive window and flips them from "active" to "archived". Cascaded children (chats linked into a larger conversation via root_chat_id) are archived alongside their parent so the conversation stays coherent.

Activity is defined as the most recent non-deleted message in the conversation family, counting messages from every role. Root chats whose status indicates ongoing work (running, pending, paused, or requires_action) are never selected for auto-archiving. Children inherit their root's archival decision.

Pinned root conversations (those with a non-zero pin order) are never selected for auto-archiving. Children are archived alongside their root regardless of individual pin status. Admins and users who want to retain a conversation long after its last message should pin the root.

Interaction with retention

Auto-archive and deletion are two independent controls:

A conversation needs to be inactive for auto_archive_days, then archived for retention_days, before it is deleted. The two windows stack additively. With auto-archive disabled by default, inactive chats are never auto-archived; once an admin opts in by setting a non-zero auto_archive_days, a conversation lives for at least auto_archive_days + retention_days from its last message before it is permanently removed.

Auto-archive (like manual archive) resets the per-chat retention clock, so the full retention_days runs from the tick that archived the chat, not from its last message.

Setting either value to 0 disables that step. Setting auto_archive_days to 0 means inactive chats are never auto-archived (users still archive manually). Setting retention_days to 0 means archived chats are kept indefinitely.

Configuration

The auto-archive window is stored as the agents_chat_auto_archive_days key in the site_configs table. The default is 0 (disabled); set to a positive number of days to enable auto-archiving.

Use the admin API to read or update the value:

Rollout advice

Auto-archive is disabled by default, so upgrading to a release that includes this feature will not archive any existing chats until an admin opts in. The first tick after enabling auto-archive on a deployment with a long history will process up to 1,000 root chats (and their children). If your deployment has a large backlog, the initial rollout will span many ticks. This is intentional and avoids stalling the rest of dbpurge during the first run. To disable, set auto_archive_days back to 0.

Audit trail

Each auto-archived root chat produces an audit log entry with the background subsystem tag chat_auto_archive. Cascaded children are not audited individually. The audit entry records the chat ID, owner ID, and organization ID, and the diff shows archived flipping from false to true.