Agent Compaction Architecture — Production Context Management

Every serious Claude Code agent eventually hits the same wall. The session was running perfectly. Then it crossed a token threshold with no architecture to handle it — and the agent came back confused, missing its own decisions, or looping. This SKILL.md is the complete fix.

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⚡ What's Inside

• Empirically verified token thresholds autocompact gate at 167k/200k window, soft warning at 160k, hard block at 177k. These numbers came from production runs, not documentation guesswork

• The 6-condition autocompact gate All six must pass before compaction is permitted. One failed condition is a full abort, not a partial execution

• 3-strike circuit breaker Consecutive compaction failures trip the breaker, prevent cascading context loss, and surface the failure cleanly instead of letting the agent degrade silently

• Post-compaction cleanup protocol The ordered sequence required after compaction to restore agent coherence before the next task begins

• freshTailCount calibration The parameter that determines how much recent context survives compaction and how to set it for your session depth

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🏭 Proven in Production

This architecture ran in a live deployment for months — same agent, back-to-back sessions, handling real tasks across multi-hour runs. The thresholds stopped being theory the day they stopped a cascade failure mid-task. Every constant in this file has a story.

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🆕 What's New in v1.1

• Cross-references added to the complete 10-skill bundle
• Attribution language removed — patterns are production-validated, not vendor-sourced

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✅ Core Capabilities

• ✅ Drop-in SKILL.md — works immediately with any Claude Code agent
• ✅ All 6 autocompact gate conditions with pass/fail logic
• ✅ 3-strike circuit breaker — prevents cascading compaction failures
• ✅ Post-compaction cleanup sequence — agent coherence restored before next task
• ✅ freshTailCount reference — calibrate context survival for your session depth
• ✅ Full threshold map: 160k warning → 167k autocompact → 177k hard block