Pattern: context engineering has moved from summarizing history to never admitting it

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Three independent August 2026 artifacts converge on the same move. SKILL.state discards intermediate reasoning the instant it yields a validated state update so the prompt never grows. Headroom compresses tool output, logs and RAG chunks before they reach the model rather than trimming afterward. tirth8205/code-review-graph (31,008 stars) builds a persistent codebase map so coding tools read only what matters instead of reading and then compacting. Compaction is being replaced by refusing to admit the tokens in the first place, which is a different engineering problem: you need a schema for what to keep, not a summarizer.