compact

compact

Squeeze a session that already holds work into a secondary source, then continue with a one-line focus.

Primary vs secondary (lossy historian)

• Primary source = the live session (people who were "in the room" — full grilled/implement reasoning).
• Secondary source = the summary after compact (or a handoff doc) — a lossy historian. Useful for maneuverability; always drops some why.
• Trade-off: continue = full info + noise + limited room; compact = less noise + more room + information loss.

Harness command names differ. Canonical action is compact-with-focus. There is no docs/HARNESS-MATRIX.md.

When (same agent / same directory still owns the work)

• Need smart-zone room without a full clear (working budget ~150k — see handoff for the full phase-boundary tree).
• Cast-iron case: implement → QA on what you just built — validate, don't re-architect; keep a focused summary so QA doesn't re-explore from zero (re-explore alone is also lossy on why).
• Residual default at the bottom of the phase-boundary tree when clear/handoff/subagent don't fit.

When NOT to compact

• Context is irrelevant to what's next → Clear (cheapest; most room).
• Crossing agent / directory / person → Handoff (portable temp doc; compaction can't seed another product).
• AFK automated review (no human) → Subagent (keep main window clean; don't spend a squeeze you'll never touch).
• Mid-grill / mid-implement while you still need primary context and you're still in the smart zone (well under ~150k) → Continue (grill→implement at ~30k is the textbook Continue). Compacting or handing off there pays loss for nothing. At ≥~150k the tree's first question already fails — Continue is off the table even mid-grill; compact or handoff instead (the tree outranks this default).
• Mid-phase auto-compact forced by the harness — treat as dangerous (style drift, forgotten features); prefer explicit boundaries.

How

1. Decide the next phase in one sentence (the focus). Example: "We're going to do QA in this area."
2. Run compact with that one-sentence focus — the summarizer is an LLM; a bare compact leaves it guessing; pasting a whole spec is wasted — one line is enough.
3. Verify the floor dropped and the focus survived.
4. Proceed with that phase only.

If auto-compact already fired mid-phase

The harness squeezed without your one-line focus. Recover, don't re-explore:

1. Check context — see what survived and where the floor is now.
2. Re-anchor in one line: the phase goal plus the binding decisions you still hold.
3. git status / git diff — files are ground truth for uncommitted work.
4. Ask: did the focus survive? If yes, continue. If no, compact again with a one-line focus, or write a handoff doc and clear.
5. Set the next boundary explicitly (see handoff) so the following squeeze is yours, not the harness's.

Related

handoff (ordered tree + "review" disambiguation) · grill-execute-clear