Why I Built a Compaction System Instead of Handing Off to New Agents
aiclaude-codeopenrigmulti-agent
When a long-running orchestrator hits context limits, the obvious move is to hand off to a fresh agent. I tried that. The startup overhead, lost momentum, and broken continuity made it worse than the problem it solved. So I built a daemon-managed compaction system instead: one that monitors context usage, writes ground truth to disk, runs a four-stage idle-gated restore protocol, and distills session knowledge into a wiki page. The daemon is the sole compaction authority; seats never self-compact. Recent research shows neither approach is categorically better, but for same-model orchestrators that accumulate judgment over time, daemon-managed compaction with external ground truth wins.
