https://www.duncanleung.com/blog 📚 Learning, 👨🏻‍💻 Building, 📝 Documenting... en-us duncan@leungs.email (Duncan Leung) duncan@leungs.email (Duncan Leung) Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.duncanleung.com/blog/openrig-compaction-system-why-compact-instead-of-handoff https://www.duncanleung.com/blog/openrig-compaction-system-why-compact-instead-of-handoff When a long-running orchestrator hits context limits, the obvious move is to hand off to a fresh agent. We tried that. The startup overhead, lost momentum, and broken continuity made it worse than the problem it solved — for our use case. So we built a compaction system instead: one that writes ground truth to disk, restores from it, and distills session knowledge into a wiki page via an API call to Haiku. Recent research shows neither approach is categorically better — compaction drops behavioral constraints, handoff carries a 'handoff tax' — but for same-model orchestrators that accumulate judgment over time, compaction with external ground truth wins. Here's how the system works and what the literature says. Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT duncan@leungs.email (Duncan Leung) aiclaude-codeopenrigmulti-agent