compact-budget-soft-ceiling
IN premise
The `compact` function treats the token budget as approximate; structural overhead (headers, truncation messages) can cause output to exceed the budget by up to ~25%.
Summary
The compaction system doesn't strictly enforce its token limit. When it reassembles the summarized conversation with section headers, truncation notices, and other structural elements, the final output can overshoot the target budget by roughly a quarter. This means downstream consumers of compacted output need to tolerate some variance rather than assuming the budget is a hard cap.
Details
| Source | entries/2026/04/24/tests-test_compact.md |