Session Budget

Decide whether this session should be compacted or cleared, and if so, hand the next session a clean briefing. Size alone is never the reason — a large session mid-thought should be left alone. The real question is composition: how much of what you are carrying is dead weight.

1. X-ray the context

You already hold this whole conversation, so assess by introspection — do not re-read the transcript. Report three things, briefly:

• Reclaimable vs. load-bearing. Roughly what fraction of current context is stale — finished sub-tasks, abandoned exploration, superseded tool output, large dumps no longer referenced — versus still live for the work ahead.
• Seam. Are you at a natural breakpoint, or mid-thought with interdependent state a lossy handoff would damage?
• Size signal. One cheap absolute measurement to ground the estimate, if a transcript path is available: