Refine Mode

Distill a long AI coding session down to the parts worth keeping — clean documentation or a reusable prompt — by curating messages in a split-pane editor and exporting the result.

Refine Mode (⌘3) treats a session transcript as raw material. You keep the messages that carry signal, drop the noise, edit what needs tightening, and insert your own connective notes, then export Markdown or a bare prompt. Everything happens in your browser against the already-imported messages; the original session log is never touched, and nothing is uploaded. The left pane is the full transcript with per-message controls; the right pane is a live Compressed Preview of what will actually export.

The split pane

• Left — the transcript. Every message as a row, tagged with its role and a per-message token badge. This is where you curate.
• Right — Compressed Preview. Exactly what your export will contain, updated as you edit. Three view chips control what it shows:
  • 👁 Full — every message, with deleted ones struck through so you can see what you cut in context.
  • ≶ Changes Only — just the messages you've deleted, edited, or inserted, for reviewing your edits.
  • ⌦ Hide Deleted — only the kept messages, i.e. the clean export as it will land.

Message labels are role-accurate and come from the single canonical map in src/kinds.js — the same vocabulary Playback uses (User, Assistant, Thinking, Tool Call, Tool Result, Inserted). Refine renders them as uppercase tags, but the words never drift from the rest of the app.

Token badges are export size, not context window. The per-message and total token counts estimate the size of the export document (roughly characters ÷ 4), with tool calls truncated to one-line previews. This is not the model's context-window usage — for that, see Session insights.

Operations

Each row has four operations, available as buttons or single-key shortcuts when the row is selected:

Key	Op	Effect
K	Keep	Un-deletes the message (marks it to include).
D	Delete	Excludes the message from the export (struck through, not removed).
E	Edit	Opens an inline textarea in the preview pane; commits on blur, Esc cancels. You can also double-click any preview block to edit it.
I	Insert	Adds an empty Inserted note after the selected row, ready to type your own connective prose.

Use ↑/↓ (or j/k) to move the selection. Pressing K or D advances to the next row, so you can triage top-to-bottom with one hand.

Noise starts pre-deleted

Tool results and thinking blocks are the bulk of a transcript's volume and rarely belong in a distilled artifact, so they start deleted. If a particular tool result or thought is worth keeping, select it and press K. Everything else — user turns, assistant turns, tool calls — starts kept.

Bulk controls

• Keep All / Delete All / Insert at start buttons sit above the transcript.
• By type toggle chips appear when the session has more than one message kind. Each chip shows a kind and its count (e.g. Tool Result 214); clicking it flips that entire kind in or out at once — the fast way to, say, drop every tool call or bring back all assistant turns.

The status bar

The bottom bar tracks your edit session and drives the export:

• Undo / Redo / Reset — ⌘Z undoes, ⇧⌘Z redoes, and the reset control (⟲) reverts to the original transcript. Typing inside an edit is a single undo step, not one per keystroke.
• Token stats — Original → Compressed → Saved, plus a bar showing the percentage of tokens you've trimmed. It fills as you delete.
• Change counts — deleted / edited / inserted (− / ✎ / ＋).

Export

The Export menu (or ⌘S for the Markdown default) writes a file straight to your machine:

• 📄 Export Markdown — a titled document with a source/date/kept-count header, then each kept message under a ### Role heading. Good for docs, PRs, or a session write-up.
• ⌁ Export as Prompt — just the kept message text, joined with blank lines and no headers or labels. Good for seeding a fresh AI session or a reusable prompt template.

Both export only the kept messages in transcript order, so what you see in ⌦ Hide Deleted is exactly what you get.

Related

• Session insights — the Overview stats, real context-window usage, and cost breakdown that the token badges here deliberately do not try to reproduce.
• Keyboard shortcuts — every Refine key (K/D/E/I, ⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z, ⌘S) and the shortcuts for the other session modes.