http://programmer.ie/tags/progressive-fidelity/ Recent content in Progressive Fidelity on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:12 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/context/12-chapter/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:12 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/context/12-chapter/ <p>A long session crosses its compaction threshold mid-investigation. The agent is halfway through a dependency migration: three candidate approaches tried, one rejected for a subtle version conflict, the current attempt half-applied, the exact error that killed the second attempt still visible three turns back. The compactor fires, because tokens crossed a number, and replaces 40,000 tokens of working history with a 2,000-token summary. The summary is fluent and mostly accurate. It records that an approach was rejected without recording which version conflict killed it. Six turns later the agent, unable to see the conflict, retries the rejected approach. The threshold did its job. The session did not survive it.</p>