After one failed/stalled summary attempt arms the 60/300/900s compression-
failure cooldown, a provider context_length_exceeded rejection entered the
reactive overflow branch in conversation_loop, which called _compress_context
without force. Since #97488 the cooldown gate returns the soft "temporarily
paused, retry in a moment" deferral instead of exhaustion, so every turn
deferred until the cooldown lapsed, and the next failure extended the ladder:
long-running sessions wedged with no automatic recovery (#100661, four sessions
lost).
Thread a narrow `bypass_cooldown` kwarg from the three provider-proven overflow
call sites (generic overflow, 413, output-cap recovery) through
AIAgent._compress_context -> compress_context -> ContextCompressor.compress ->
_generate_summary. It skips ONLY the summary-failure cooldown check at each gate.
Unlike force=True it does not clear the cooldown, does not skip the feasibility /
anti-thrash breakers, and a failed attempt records its cooldown normally. The
attempt is bounded by the existing compression_attempts/max_compression_attempts
budget, so there is no retry loop. The preflight threshold gate is unchanged:
ordinary over-threshold pressure still honors the cooldown (#11529).
Engines whose _automatic_compression_blocked()/compress() predate the kwarg
(plugins, test doubles) are called with the legacy signature.
Tests: cooldown armed + bypass_cooldown -> summarizer invoked and transcript
compacted; ordinary pass still deferred. Docs note the cooldown/overflow
contract in the developer guide.
Fixes#100661Closes#97766 (overflow-force idea; the bundled continuation changes were not taken)
Co-authored-by: sgtworkman <178342791+sgtworkman@users.noreply.github.com>