Rescue

Move the work of a chat that is running out of room into a fresh chat — without losing the thread.

Rescue is a single-use, natural-language program that a chat performs. It rescues a long-running conversation that has started to degrade and carries its working state into a new chat, where the work continues from where it left off.

Source: github.com/pocojoe/rescue · MIT License · © 2026 Joseph M. Miller MD MPH

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The problem it solves

A chat that has been used for a long time becomes unreliable: context gets compacted, earlier decisions drift, and files loaded along the way fall out of reach. Rescue captures what matters before that happens and re-establishes it cleanly in a fresh chat.

What's in rescue.zip

rescue.zip is the downloadable tool. It contains four files and nothing else:

File	Purpose
rescue-v1.0.ci.txt	The rescue program — natural-language instructions a chat performs.
README-newchat.txt	Operator-facing text shown on the recovery side.
README-oldchat.txt	Operator-facing text shown on the packing side.
rescue-v1.0.ci.txt.sha256	Drift-check hash of the program, computed at build time.

No executable code ships in the capsule — the program is text the chat reads and acts on.

How to use it

Rescue has two sides. It detects which one applies from context.

Pack side — in the tired chat

1. Download rescue.zip and upload it into the chat you want to move out of.
2. Tell the chat: "Read and follow directions."
3. Rescue builds the state capsule, shows the Terms of Use and the list of saved work, and asks to continue.
4. On confirmation, it produces a timestamped capsule named rescue-<datetime>.zip for download.

Recover side — in a fresh chat

1. Open a new chat and upload the rescue-<datetime>.zip capsule.
2. Tell the chat: "Read and follow directions."
3. Rescue confirms the chat is new, optionally lists or imports the saved files, loads the carried state, shows a short "Last Discussed" resumption snippet, and asks what to do next.

Work resumes from the transferred state whether or not the working files are re-imported.

What rescue carries

Five axes of state, plus a resumption snippet and the working files:

• goal — what the operator is trying to do
• rules — things set and not to change
• files — the files and things the work uses
• decisions — choices made, not to redo
• next_step — the one thing to do next
• a ~50-word Last Discussed snippet, and a gzipped archive of the working directory

Integrity

A SHA-256 over the capsule contents is computed when the capsule is built and re-checked on the recovery side. A mismatch produces a warning but is not fatal — recovery proceeds so work is never blocked by a checksum difference.

Design principles

• Single-use, loaded at performance. Rescue is uploaded fresh each time, performed once in the chat it was uploaded into, then discarded with that chat.
• No self-carriage. Rescue never copies itself into the capsule it produces.
• Text only in transit. No run scripts or executables travel in the capsule.
• No host assumptions. The sandbox uses its own layout; rescue assumes no vendor or host directory structure.
• State always loads. Importing the working files is optional; the five-axis state always loads so work can continue from the transfer.
• Fresh chat only. Rescue moves work forward into a new chat; it does not rebuild the chat it came from.

License

Released under the MIT License. Free to use, change, and share. Provided "as is", without warranty.