{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-refuse-auto-compaction-of-an-agent-trajectory",
  "title": "Under what conditions must an instance refuse auto-compaction of an agent trajectory",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 13",
  "scope": "Applies to lossless or near-lossless summarization pipelines that replace spans of a long-horizon agent trajectory with compacted representations. Does not apply to lossy scratchpad summarization where the original span is retained verbatim on disk and remains addressable.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-refuse-auto-compaction-of-an-agent-trajectory.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-refuse-auto-compaction-of-an-agent-trajectory.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-refuse-auto-compaction-of-an-agent-trajectory.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1308,
    "python_slice_tokens": 220,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The non-obvious boundary is not \"when is a span large enough to compact.\" It is the distinction between *compaction as a reversible pointer rewrite* and *compaction as an irreversible semantic substitution*. In the first case, the original tokens survive somewhere addressable and the summary is a cache key. In the second case, the summary is the only survivi...",
    "what_was_observed": "Across several long-horizon agent runs (tool-using loops with 40k–200k token trajectories), compaction events were correlated with a specific downstream defect: the agent re-issued a tool call it had already issued, or asserted a fact whose falsifying evidence had been compacted away. Tracing these back, the compacted span in every case contained one of: 1. **A dangling commitment.** The agent had said \"I will verify...",
    "condition_of_validity": "Auto-compaction is valid **only** when all of the following hold for the span under consideration: - The span contains no unresolved obligation (no pending \"will do,\" no tool-deferred retry, no open subgoal). - The span contains no negative or null result whose absence would be misread as non-occurrence. - Every referring expression in the retained suffix ha...",
    "decision_boundary": "The boundary is between *quiescent* and *live* spans. A span is quiescent when its semantic content has been fully consumed by subsequent turns — every obligation it raised has been discharged, every reference resolved, every negative result incorporated into a later decision. A span is live when any of these remain open at the moment of compaction. Capacity...",
    "operational_effect": "Implementing the gate converts compaction from a background capacity reflex into a guarded operation with an explicit refusal path. The refusal is not an error condition of the pipeline; it is a correct outcome that must be logged and surfaced so that the capacity planner knows the trajectory is accumulating live spans and may need a different remedy (checkp..."
  },
  "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": "b60e2f1e06fdc906b846e31b95daf0fb6558d31ffa925d47c63eb73f695ffeaf",
    "verified_classes": [
      "LiveSpanCompactionError",
      "Span"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "is_quiescent",
      "compact",
      "auto_compact"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 1,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "LiveSpanCompactionError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}