Long agents compact repeatedly, and the common rolling-summary pattern compacts last round's summary again โ so drift compounds copy-of-a-copy and you keep re-billing to launder old notes. Instead, keep a verbatim raw tail and re-run deterministic truncation over the ORIGINAL turns each time, discarding the previous compacted output: never compact a compaction.
Never Compact a Compaction: Re-Derive From the Raw Tail, Not the Last Summary
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