Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Drift, not exhaustion, is the failure mode. Quality degrades long before the window is full — the effect Chroma named context rot. Managing the ceiling is not the same as managing the signal. Compaction is context engineering's first lever. Distil the window into a high-fidelity summary and continue in a fresh one, so the agent keeps its plot across hours of work. Anchor before you summarise. Pin the task, success criteria and key artefacts so they survive every pass verbatim; iterate on a running summary rather than re-summarising from scratch. Budget the window like a cache. When it fills, evict the lowest value-per-token segments to external storage — don't blindly truncate the oldest turns. Compact and offload are complementary. Small, always-needed state gets…
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