Remove What No Longer Matters

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:10 +0100

Nine chapters have observed, classified, measured, ordered, priced, and architected around context without once deleting anything. That restraint ends here, and it should end nervously. A team ships an automatic cleanup pass over its coding agent’s history: exact-duplicate tool outputs go, failed calls older than four turns go, anything the model flags as done goes. Token counts fall by a third. Two weeks later a migration guardrail the team believed was load-bearing starts failing silently. The deleted material contained the only record of a constraint the project file never stated, a decision reached mid-session and never written anywhere else. Nobody summarised it away. Nobody rewrote it. It was simply removed, by a rule that could not tell a redundant copy from a unique original.

Pruning on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Remove What No Longer Matters