http://programmer.ie/tags/compaction/ Recent content in Compaction on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:15:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/browser-ai-from-first-principles/10-chapter/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:15:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/browser-ai-from-first-principles/10-chapter/ <p>A stateful session eventually encounters a physical limit.</p> <p>Prompts, initial instructions, examples, conversation history and model outputs all compete for a finite context budget. Once the budget is exhausted, the application cannot solve the problem by pretending the next message is independent.</p> <p>The difficult question is not how to delete text.</p> <p>It is how to preserve the right state.</p> <hr> <h2 id="1-the-context-window-is-a-budget">1. The context window is a budget</h2> <p>When a session exposes usage and quota, context pressure becomes observable:</p>