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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

> "Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that..."

I appreciate and follow Matt Pocock's advice: avoid autocompaction. Compaction is lossy, which is ok when you're managing it at phase boundaries, but autocompact is lossy at the most inopportune times, firing mid-task and leading to agents going off the rails.

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Bad advice, compaction is why Codex is so fantastic.

My conversations compact hundreds of times. By the time it has done a dozen or so compactions, it fully understands the work I want it to do (and how). It's almost like having a fine-tuned Astra model.

10/10, would recommend.

I'm not sure I follow; how is autocompaction (lossy summarization), applied at random times (vs strategically, between workflow phases), helpful to ensuring clarity of intent? Maybe you're saying that just plowing ahead and living with the signal loss along the way works well enough for your purposes. In which case, ok, YMMV, different strokes.... but paying attention to context quality and being deliberate about when to compact vs handoff vs delegate to subagents is most definitely not "bad advice".

I agree with @erichocean on this. In theory, compaction is bad. But in practice I found the model is smart enough to write critical details down somewhere, and post-compaction the model doesn't make assumptions. A small amount of time is lost reading materials, but the benefit is that you can operate unbounded vs doing small controlled chunks, which is what I used to do with Opus back in the day. Now I just give it as big a task as I can think of.

not my experience at all. compaction during a task is fatal since you lose all of the details of edits and progress halfway through. compacting after task completion is fine though.

This approach got good with Sol. With 5.5 I'd break tasks up, record planning docs, etc.

Now with Sol I rarely bother. It's really good at remembering the salient details. Its also great at continuing a pattern I setup, like commit after finishing each feature block, etc.

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