Compressing Knowledge

Compression is trustworthy only if something that never saw the original can still pass a test on it. Treat every draft as unverified until then.

When Not To Use

• Some information loss is acceptable — just summarize; the harness is overkill.
• The task is prose style or code tightening, not fact preservation — use a style or simplification pass instead.
• No subagent can run with a genuinely empty context (see Verification) — say so; offer only an unverified summary if still wanted.

Workflow

1. Baseline. Record the source's token count with a consistent proxy (wc -w is enough; only consistency across iterations matters).
2. Extract test questions. Before drafting, pull out question/answer pairs, each grounded in one distinct fact and traceable to a specific passage. Scale count to length: roughly one per 40 source tokens, minimum 5, or the user's stated count. Done when no two questions share a fact and every answer is written down.
3. Verify the harness. Give a grading subagent only the original source and the bare questions (no answers). Grade its answers against the recorded ones yourself. A failure means the question is ambiguous or ungrounded — fix or drop it and re-run until the source passes every question. This is the ground truth later drafts are measured against.
4. Cut, then test. Cut redundancy, restatement, and filler into a candidate draft — cutting content, not whitespace or formatting, which doesn't reduce real footprint. Give a grading subagent only the candidate draft (never the original) and the bare questions; grade its answers.
   • All pass → new safe anchor. Return here and cut further.
   • Any fail → floor found; go to step 5.
5. Repair. Patch the failing draft with the minimum addition that restores the missing fact(s) — don't revert wholesale to the last anchor. Re-test until it passes every question, then retry step 4 from the repaired draft.
6. Stop. Finish when two consecutive repair-then-shrink attempts fail to beat the last safe anchor's size, or a user-given budget is exhausted. Never hand back a draft that hasn't itself passed every question.
7. Report. Deliver the final text plus: baseline and final token counts and reduction %, the full question/answer set (for re-verifying future edits), and an iteration log (draft tokens → pass/fail → what failed → repair made).

Verification

Every grading subagent is a fresh, non-fork Agent call (e.g. general-purpose): a fork inherits your context, including the source, which defeats the test. Without one, verification is unavailable — say so plainly, and never claim the result is lossless.

Grade strictly: a hedge ("not stated"), a partial answer, or a wrong fact all count as failure — the method depends on treating "probably fine" as failure.