Quality degrades long before you hit compaction, compaction is the "Next gas station, 100 miles" sign but you're already in the middle of nowhere.

You don't need to go down the rabbit hole of crazy workflows, but to avoid slop:

- Break down the work into tasks

- New context. Create a plan for one task.

- New context. Implement the plan.

- New context. /code-review the implementation

- New context. Fix the review findings.

- Repeat for next task.

I do this with Fable 5, and the quality is consistently quite good. If the context goes over 50%, the quality will become crap and you end up with 4 duplicates of the same thing across the codebase. Letting a current session review its own work is like asking a student to grade their own paper.