markoblogo Compaction Survival
Save tokens by keeping the right state alive across compaction instead of re-deriving it after memory loss.
Goal
When a session is getting long, preserve only the working state that would be expensive to reconstruct.
What To Preserve
- current objective;
- active subtask list;
- key decisions and reversals;
- files changed or inspected deeply;
- unresolved errors and their current hypothesis;
- blockers, constraints, and pending verifications;
- exact artifact paths for large outputs or generated files.
What Not To Preserve
- long narrative history;
- repeated summaries of already-resolved steps;
- raw logs that can be regenerated cheaply;
- generic project documentation already available on disk.
Checkpoint Workflow
- Detect compaction risk:
- long session;
- many files touched;
- many turns of debugging or research;
- user explicitly worried about token budget.
- Emit a compact handoff artifact:
- objective;
- done / next / blocked;
- decisive evidence only;
- exact paths for deeper artifacts.
- Keep the checkpoint stable unless the working state materially changes.
- After compaction or resume, recover from the checkpoint first instead of replaying the whole session.
Recommended Shapes
- concise handoff note;
- checked-location ledger;
- issue-specific status file in
docs/ai/tasks/or equivalent; - compact bullets over narrative prose.
Guardrails
- Do not checkpoint secrets.
- Do not create noisy per-turn diary files.
- Do not preserve stale hypotheses after the evidence changed.
- Do not replace real verification with checkpoint confidence.
Final Report
Say what was checkpointed, where it lives, and what should be reused first after resuming.