Compaction
Replacing the older part of a long conversation with a summary so the agent can keep going.
When the context nears its limit, the harness or API summarizes earlier turns and continues from the summary. Details that were not captured are gone, so what survives depends on what the summary keeps.
Related terms
- Context window: The maximum number of tokens the model can read and write in one request.
- Context rot: Model quality drops as the context fills with old, irrelevant or conflicting material.
