| name | strategic-compact |
| description | Maintainer-only context compaction guidance for long curation or migration sessions. Suggests manual compaction at logical boundaries instead of arbitrary compaction points. |
| risk | safe |
| source | codex-max |
| origin | ECC-adapted |
| date_added | 2026-04-19 |
Strategic Compact
Overview
strategic-compact is a maintainer-only context-management skill.
Use it during long-running curation, migration, or repository-maintenance sessions when context pressure starts to reduce quality.
The goal is to compact deliberately at logical boundaries rather than in the middle of unresolved work.
Use when
- Running a long skill-catalog curation session
- Migrating or reorganizing the workspace surface over many phases
- Switching from analysis to implementation, or from one rollout wave to another
- Context pressure is increasing and the session should be reset cleanly
Recommended compaction points
Compact at logical boundaries such as:
- after inventory / research is complete
- after a rollout wave is verified
- before switching to a different repo or workflow surface
- after a failed approach that should not pollute the next attempt
Avoid compacting:
- in the middle of an active code edit
- while unresolved implementation details still live only in conversation state
- before important findings have been persisted to files
Preserve before compacting
Before compacting, ensure key state is written to durable artifacts such as:
task_plan.mdfindings.mdprogress.mdskills/CATALOG.mdskills/manifest.yaml- docs or ADR artifacts created during the session
Output contract
When using this skill, state:
- Current phase
- Why this is a logical compact point
- What has been written to disk
- What the next phase will focus on after compacting
Related skills
planning-with-files — persistent working memory on diskagent-sort — classify the skill surface before compactionmanage-skills — apply curation changes after context has been stabilized
