Serious questions, I often hear about this "let the LLM cook for hours" but how do you do that in practice and how does it manages its own context? How doesn't it get lost at all after so many tokens?
over long periods of time, checklists are the biggest thing, so the LLM can track whats already done and whats left. after a compact, it can pull the relevant stuff back up and make progress.
having some level or hierarchy is also useful - requirements, high level designs, low level designs, etc