Compaction

“Context engineering” is getting used as a rebrand for prompt writing, and that undersells it into uselessness. The actual discipline is deciding, every single turn, what earns a place in a bounded window and what gets evicted — and living with the fact that every eviction is a bet you’re making about the future of a run you haven’t finished yet. Here’s the physical constraint underneath the buzzword, the packing decision that’s actually hard, what it costs to get it wrong, and how to test whether your packing policy works.

When the context window fills up, the standard fix is to summarize the old turns and keep going. That summary is a lossy compression step, and the thing it silently drops is usually the one early constraint the agent needs a hundred turns later. Here’s why recency-based compaction fails, a simulation of how often the load-bearing fact survives, and the rule that actually protects it.