🌮 Nacho Flow v1.4.2: Checklist Loop Fix, In-Flight Token Compaction & Faster Agent Runs

[dixieflatline76]

🌮 Nacho Flow v1.4.2: Checklist Loop Fix, In-Flight Token Compaction & Faster Agent Runs

This release fixes a frustrating bug where Cycle Killer killed agent streams while updating task checklists, validates live in-flight token savings with NTS, and sets new speed and cost records across autonomous coding benchmarks.

---

🛡️ 1. Stop Killing Agents While Updating Checklists & Todo Lists

• The Bug: When agents like Zoo Code or Cline work through a project, they frequently update a checklist or todo list (often marking 10–20 items as "status": "completed" at once). Because task tools were previously evaluated as shell commands rather than file writes, Cycle Killer saw the repeated status words as a runaway loop, killed the stream mid-flight, and threw the model into a 2-minute cooldown.
• The Fix: Task and checklist tools (update_todo_list, updateTodoList, todo_list) are now recognized as write operations. They bypass repetitive phrase checks while still respecting maximum write boundaries (32k tokens), completely eliminating false-positive loop terminations.

---

🗜️ 2. In-Flight Token Compaction (NTS) in Action

• How It Works: Nacho Token Saver strips ANSI escapes, collapses progress spinners, and cleans repetitive empty lines from terminal output in-place before it enters conversation history.
• Cache-Friendly: Maintained over 80% prompt cache hit rates in multi-turn runs—proving that cleaning noisy terminal output doesn't disrupt prompt caching.
• Context Relief: Saved over 4,500 tokens per session, keeping long-running agent contexts leaner and cheaper.

---

⚡ 3. Benchmark Records: 14 Minutes & €0.23 Full Project Build

We tested v1.4.2 against our end-to-end Blackjack TUI & Monte Carlo engine benchmark:

• Zoo Code + GLM-5.3-Flash: Built the full project, passed all unit tests (92–98% coverage), and verified Monte Carlo simulation in 14.5 minutes for just $0.25 (€0.23) with 0 loops and 0 crashes.
• Cline + Qwen3 Coder Plus: Finished in 16.2 minutes (down from 45+ minutes on generic setups) and compiled a fully working binary on the first try.

---

🧪 Verification

• All 19 Go packages passed test suites with 95.6% statement coverage.
• 0 data races detected (go test -race ./...).
• 0 lint or vet warnings (go vet ./...).
• Cross-platform CI green on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

---

📦 Installation & Quickstart

VS Code Companion Extension (Recommended)

Install directly from the VS Code Marketplace or via CLI:

code --install-extension dixieflatline76.nacho-flow

Standalone Go Daemon (Build from Source)

git clone https://github.com/dixieflatline76/nacho-flow.git
cd nacho-flow
make build
./bin/nacho-flow

---

This discussion was created from the release 🌮 Nacho Flow v1.4.2: Checklist Loop Fix, In-Flight Token Compaction & Faster Agent Runs.