ACI-014: The Handoff to Yourself

Thesis

When a session compacts or ends, the next context knows only what was written to a file before it. So write the handoff before the compaction, not after it: the next action as an instruction, what must not be done, which choices were made, and the state of every uncommitted file. When you pick the work up again, treat that handoff as a set of claims and re-measure them before you act.

Story

A long session with a coding agent does not stay whole. When the conversation fills the context window, Claude Code compacts it: earlier messages are replaced by a summary, and the session carries on. Lamplight's own analysis of its sessions found 192 compactions across 23 sessions between 11 and 18 June 2026 (Lamplight intent/autopsy/20260618.md), so compaction is the normal condition of long work, not an accident.