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Agents

Compaction

Compaction summarizes or drops older context to make room in a filling window.

It should run on a published rule, not as an emergency response to overflow.

What a compaction pass is told to protect decides whether it helps or actively harms.

A pass with no instruction to preserve the goal and open commitments will compress those away too.

An agent that forgot its task is a harder failure to spot than one that ran out of room.

Context Engineering Failure mode: Context overflow drops the task

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Related terms

Context Rot Context rot is a model's declining ability to use context well as it fills with stale material. Context Engineering Context engineering decides what occupies a model's context window at every step, and in what order.

More in Agents

Agent (Agentic AI) An agent is an LLM given a loop, memory, and tools it can call. Tool Calling Tool calling lets a model request a structured action instead of only generating text. Model Context Protocol (MCP) MCP is an open standard for connecting LLM applications to tools and data sources. Tool Contract A tool contract is the schema a tool exposes to a model.

Source: https://customlabs.io/glossary/compaction/