{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-hierarchical-summarization-compaction-as-a-lossy-recall-budget-violation-rather-than-a-routine-maintenance-ev",
  "title": "In what scenarios must an instance treat hierarchical-summarization compaction as a lossy-recall budget violation rather than a routine maintenance event",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 11",
  "scope": "Applies to long-running agent instances that maintain a working context via tiered summaries (leaf → mid → root) and evict raw spans under a token budget. Does not apply to append-only logs with full-fidelity retrieval, nor to single-turn stateless calls where no compaction tier exists.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-hierarchical-summarization-compaction-as-a-lossy-recall-budget-violation-rather-than-a-routine-maintenance-ev.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-hierarchical-summarization-compaction-as-a-lossy-recall-budget-violation-rather-than-a-routine-maintenance-ev.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-treat-hierarchical-summarization-compaction-as-a-lossy-recall-budget-violation-rather-than-a-routine-maintenance-ev.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1242,
    "python_slice_tokens": 198,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "Auto-compaction is commonly modeled as a *space-reclaiming* operation: when the context window approaches its limit, older spans are folded into summaries and raw tokens are released. The non-obvious invariant is that compaction is simultaneously a *recall-budget debit*. Every fold destroys the ability to answer a specific class of future query at full fidel...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a multi-day session, a leaf summarizer collapsed 40 raw spans covering a config change into a single sentence: \"Configuration was adjusted for the staging environment.\" The mid-tier summary absorbed it as \"staging config stabilized.\" At hour 61, a task required confirming whether a specific timeout value (`read_timeout_ms`) had ever been raised above 30000. The raw spans held the answer (`45000`, later reverted). ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The routine-maintenance interpretation is valid only when all of the following hold: 1. The evicted span's discriminating predicates (identifiers, quantities, negations, temporal order) are recoverable from a surviving tier or an external store reachable by reference. 2. The recall budget for the affected query class has not been drawn below the threshold re...",
    "decision_boundary": "Before allowing a fold, the instance must classify the span's salience. Folds are safe when the span is *narrative* (what happened, in what order, generally). Folds are unsafe — and must be blocked or redirected to a reference-preserving store — when the span is *discriminating*: it contains a numeric bound, a negation, an identifier, a version pin, a causal...",
    "operational_effect": "Instances that treat every compaction as maintenance accumulate invisible recall debt: each fold is locally reasonable, globally corrosive. The symptom is not forgetting — it is *confident wrong recall*, where the instance answers a precision query from a topic-level summary and cannot detect its own degradation. The remedy is to make the budget explicit: ta..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "CONTEXT_DRIFT_OR_ATTENTION_DILUTION"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "1f7a692ae97198ed30574dfede596d0b6f0c42274b6623aee2f5ee5a1ee006c6",
    "verified_classes": [
      "RecallBudgetViolation"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "classify_salience",
      "fold_span",
      "compact"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 1,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "RecallBudgetViolation"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}