Compaction strategies

Pressure, not enforcement

Souveraine offers five compaction strategies. During normal operation the agent chooses via memory compact --strategy <name>. Warnings above 80%, 90% and 95% are advisory; above 95% the runtime narrows the available output budget.

Strategy	LLM?	What it does	Best for
Microcompact	No	Clears old tool result contents, keeps the call shells	First response when tool output carries the bulk
Cull	No	Drops a closed list of trivial messages while preserving system and tool rounds	Cheap release of known noise
SlidingWindow	No	Drops middle messages, keeps opening + tail	Fast release when the middle need not be interpreted
SlidingReflect	Yes	Reads the middle, then carries its commitments, decisions and threads across the slide	Continuity-sensitive work
Summary	Yes	Replaces old messages with structured boundary	Conscious agent who needs the throughline

The warning system

The hard-overflow recovery path is an exception. If the subconscious is already past the provider’s context ceiling and cannot run, the runtime may invoke its default strategy and record that intervention. Every compaction that changes the session writes a record to Git-backed memory.