PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A purchasing agent created order ORD-42 and holds the receipt in its transcript, next to an earlier attempt for the same item that failed and was then retried successfully. Two more items the user authorized have not been ordered yet. The user restates the goal in every message, the run has no iteration budget, and after earlier compactions this agent has re-placed orders that had already gone through. The transcript is about to be compacted again.
Which fact must survive compaction?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: The confirmed order ID and the authorization not yet used
A durable summary has to separate completed effects from pending work: ORD-42 records that the order exists, so the agent does not buy it twice, and the remaining authorization records what it may still do. The request text matters when the goal can be lost across a compaction, and this user restates it every message. A tool-call count matters when an iteration budget is what bounds the run, and this run has none. The last error matters when the next step is diagnosing a dependency that is still failing; that call was already retried successfully, so keeping the error invites a retry of a call whose success is no longer in context.