/goal Stop hook fails with "Prompt is too long" in long sessions
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened May 20, 2026 by chaosconst Closed May 24, 2026
Summary
In a long-running session, the /goal Stop hook (the session-scoped condition evaluator) fails hard with:
Stop hook error: Hook evaluator API error: Prompt is too long
Once this happens, the hook can no longer evaluate the goal condition, so it neither blocks-with-reason nor auto-clears — it just errors every time the agent tries to stop.
Repro
- Start a session and let it grow large (long multi-hour conversation with lots of tool output).
- Set a goal:
/goal <some condition>. - Continue working until the transcript is large.
- When the agent attempts to stop, the Stop hook evaluator errors with
Prompt is too long.
Expected
The goal evaluator should degrade gracefully instead of hard-erroring:
- Truncate / summarize the transcript before sending to the evaluator, or use a larger-context model for the evaluation call, and/or
- On evaluator failure, allow the stop to proceed (fail-open) rather than blocking with an error, and/or
- Surface a clear, actionable message (e.g. "goal evaluation skipped: context too large; goal still active") and let the user
/goal clear.
Impact
- The goal feature becomes unusable in exactly the sessions where it's most useful (long, sustained work toward a condition).
- The condition may already be satisfied, but because the evaluator can't run, the goal won't auto-clear and the user keeps hitting the error until they manually
/goal clear.
Environment
- Claude Code CLI
- Long session (several hours, large transcript)
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