Summarization

Domain Context

What is this skill? Prose condensation and abstraction patterns for AI agents: extracting key findings from long reports, writing executive summaries, creating TLDRs, compressing context for handoffs between agents, progressive summarization, audit report condensation, and the discipline of deciding what to keep and what to cut when space is limited. Use when summarizing session findings, writing wrap reports, condensing research for durable notes, creating executive summaries of audits, compressing context before agent handoffs, or distilling long documents into actionable briefs. Do NOT use for data compression algorithms (use compression), context-window budget management (use context-window), working-set selection (use context-management), prose tone repair (use writing-humanizer), or quality scoring (use evaluation).

Summarization is not shortening. It is the skill of identifying what matters and discarding what doesn't — while preserving the causal chain that makes the remaining content useful.

Coverage

Extractive summarization (pulling key sentences verbatim), abstractive summarization (rewriting in fewer words while preserving meaning), progressive summarization (Tiago Forte's 3-layer highlight method adapted for agent work), executive summary structure (situation → findings → recommendations → next steps), TLDR generation (one-sentence distillation of a complex document), session wrap condensation (converting 50+ findings into a prioritized summary), research-to-memory compression (distilling task research into memory-file-sized briefs), agent handoff summaries (what the next agent needs to know, nothing else), audit report condensation (from raw findings to scored summary with evidence), and the information-theoretic principle of lossy compression — what you choose to lose defines the quality of the summary.

Philosophy

Every agent in this system produces more text than any human will read. Session logs run to thousands of lines. Research files contain every detail an agent discovered. Audit reports list every finding at every severity level. Without summarization discipline, this output becomes noise — technically complete but practically useless.

The failure mode is not missing information but buried information. A 500-line research file that contains the answer on line 347 is worse than a 50-line summary that puts the answer in the first paragraph. A wrap report that lists 30 findings without priority is worse than one that highlights the 3 critical findings and links to the rest.

Summarization is lossy by definition. The skill is in choosing what to lose. The rules below encode that choice: keep decisions and their rationale, keep blockers and their workarounds, keep numbers and their context — drop process narration, drop tool output, drop hedging.