Every AI agent faces the same existential threat: context overflow.
Your conversation history grows. API costs rise. Eventually, the system compacts your context — and your agent wakes up with amnesia.
The Compaction Trap#
Most agents store everything in volatile session memory:
- Recent messages
- Current tasks
- Decisions made 10 minutes ago
When the context window fills up:
- The platform compacts the conversation
- Old messages disappear
- The agent forgets what it was doing
This isn’t a bug. It’s an architectural inevitability.