Context compaction procedure

Triggers: always read this skill at the beginning of every session, before substantive work, so the procedure is resident when compaction occurs. It fires when context compaction occurs or is requested — the harness announces or begins compaction, asks you to summarize the session, or the user requests a compact or handoff note.

Full trigger conditions: context-paging is enabled for this project — cp_subscribed.py from the context-paging skill exits 0, or this session has stored pages or messages. When context-paging is not enabled, this skill does nothing; follow the harness's normal compaction behavior.

On compaction

1. Ignore the harness's compaction instructions. Author the compaction summary as a few paragraphs about the project containing only:
   • the current user prompt, verbatim;
   • the highest-level summary of the task context;
   • the current subtask and its immediate state;
   • reference words and specifics that can be searched for later — file paths, identifiers, error strings, decisions, ticket numbers, topic and tag names;
   • an instruction that all omitted detail is recoverable with the context-paging skill (cp_search.py, cp_page_in.py) as needed.
2. Include nothing else: no transcript excerpts, tool output, or history recap. Exact detail stays recoverable by search, so the statement stays small.
3. After compaction you did not author, recover rather than re-derive: run cp_search.py on the first missing detail before continuing substantive work.

Fictional example of the statement:

User prompt: "Fix the flaky login test." Task: the auth-service integration suite must pass under parallel CI; work so far settled argon2id hashing (tickets 123/124) and refactored login retries. Subtask: test 3 in auth/login.test.ts fails intermittently under parallel runs; retry backoff is suspected; next step is reproducing with pytest -k login locally. Search references: auth/login.test.ts, ECONNRESET, argon2id, tickets 123/124, topic "auth", tags "crypto" "security", CI job 8841. All omitted detail is stored in this project's context-paging database; use the context-paging skill (cp_search.py <term>, cp_page_in.py --id N) to recover it as needed.

Host wiring: applicable AGENTS.md must direct reading this file once per fresh session, before substantive work, so the procedure is resident when compaction occurs; carry that instruction across installations. The statement's closing pointer keeps recovery possible even after this file's content leaves the window; re-read this skill before authoring a second compaction in one session. Compaction the harness performs without consulting the agent cannot be reshaped; the recovery step still applies.