strategic-compaction

Strategic Compaction

Purpose: Choose between continue, compact, and reset without losing work or fabricating context. Scope: Long-running sessions, checkpoint transitions, agent handoffs, token-pressure events.

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When to Use This Skill

• Token budget is approaching the provider's compaction trigger.
• A workflow checkpoint just changed (Plan -> Work, Work -> Review, Review -> Compound Capture).
• The user explicitly says "compact", "reset", "start over", or "switch agent".
• The chat transcript and the repo state have begun to disagree.

When NOT to Use

• Mid-implementation, halfway through editing a file. Finish the bounded slice first.
• During an active validation run (tests executing, command in flight).
• Inside a self-review iteration where the next step is already queued.

Decision Order

Try these in order. Pick the first one whose preconditions hold.

1. Continue in place when the active issue, plan, slice, and blocker state are still coherent and the budget will hold for at least one more bounded step.
2. Compact when the work is still coherent but token pressure is the main constraint, and a durable plan + progress log already record the state.
3. Reset when continuing would rely on stale chat state or conflicting assumptions instead of durable artifacts.

If you cannot reconstruct the active slice, blocker, and next action from durable artifacts, prefer reset over compaction. A compaction that summarizes a confused state preserves the confusion.

Checkpoint Heuristics

Checkpoint Transition	Safe to compact?	Why
Brainstorm -> Plan	Yes	Plan is the durable artifact; transcript can be summarized.
Plan -> Work	Yes, after research	Compact AFTER you have read the spec, BEFORE you start editing.
Mid-Work, mid-file-edit	No	Implementation context is in the head, not yet in any artifact. Finish the slice.
Mid-Work, between bounded slices	Yes	Slice contract and evidence summary carry state across the boundary.
Work -> Review	Yes	Diff, tests, and evidence summary are durable.
Review -> Compound Capture	Yes	Review artifact + findings file carry the state.
Inside an active retry / pivot decision	No	The decision rationale only lives in the transcript right now.