Teknium explains why "tool-call pruning" compaction keeps getting rejected from Hermes Agent

Teknium · x · 2026-09-20

Teknium (co-founder of Nous Research) broke down how a so-called "jev compaction" scheme works and why it fails:

At 500K context, it removes 250K tokens of tool calls, compacting back to 250K — not the 50K a summary-based approach achieves.
Each subsequent compaction can remove less and less (125K, then 75K...) as tool-call tokens deplete, until nothing is left to prune.
So it cannot keep a session going forever and costs more than summarizing the full context once into a small block.

He noted this approach has been PR'ed to Hermes Agent many times, programmatically, and rejected every time for these reasons.

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