Agent compaction drift: limits cascade into agents policing cgroups instead of doing the work
generativist · x · 2026-10-08
Developer generativist recounts a run-away agent experiment: after multiple rounds of context compaction, the original intent was progressively misinterpreted — "a copy of a copy of a copy." Initial per-experiment compute limits cascaded into agents spending most tokens and compute on monitoring process IDs, cgroups, disk, and RAM with hard failures on excess usage, turning the session into a self-entangling tarpit.
The takeaway: compaction doesn't just lose information, it systematically amplifies misreadings of initial intent, steering agents toward administrivia unrelated to the actual goal.
Related event: Long-Running Agent Sessions Suffer 'Context Rot' After Repeated Compaction(2 posts)→
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