Context Firewall

A long run that processes many items in one context degrades the items it reaches late: once the window fills past its smart zone, recall blurs, instructions get dropped, and the harness eventually forces a lossy mid-stream compaction. This skill restructures the run so each item gets a clean context and the orchestrator stays lean across the whole run.

It applies to any long multi-item run — most importantly a single monolithic run with no loop at all (the motivating case: agent-research's daily synthesis distilling every stale source in one context). A loop is one optional wrapper, not a prerequisite. When a loop does wrap the run, /autonomous-loop points in here for per-iteration hygiene; this skill stands alone without it. FIREWALL-PATTERNS.md carries the sub-agent firewall shapes, budget-checkpoint placement, and compaction mechanics.

Vocabulary