Glossary › Compaction
Compaction
Summarizing or dropping earlier context when the window fills. Always lossy; the engineering is in deciding what to keep, keeping raw artifacts retrievable by ID, and measuring how often it happens.
Where Compaction shows up
All matching postsAgent Memory: Working, Episodic, and Long-Term, and Why Compaction Is Lossy
"Give the agent memory" hides three different stores with three different write policies, and conflating them is how one bad run poisons every future one. Here is the taxonomy, the policies, and how to compact a full context without the agent forgetting the deadline.
#agent-memory#context-engineering#agent-engineering#agents