Strategic Compaction

Purpose: Choose between continue, compact, and reset without losing work or fabricating context. Scope: Long-running sessions, checkpoint transitions, agent handoffs, token-pressure events.

When to Use This Skill

• Token budget is approaching the provider's compaction trigger.
• A workflow checkpoint just changed (Plan -> Work, Work -> Review, Review -> Compound Capture).
• The user explicitly says "compact", "reset", "start over", or "switch agent".
• The chat transcript and the repo state have begun to disagree.

When NOT to Use

• Mid-implementation, halfway through editing a file. Finish the bounded slice first.
• During an active validation run (tests executing, command in flight).
• Inside a self-review iteration where the next step is already queued.