The Compaction Bill

What a summary call costs

Library › Context Problems

1. The Context Window

2. Window Occupancy

3. Growth per Turn

4. Remaining Space

5. Turn Budget

6. Retrieval Footprint

7. Retrieval per Turn

8. Search Rounds

9. Window Sizing

10. Truncation

11. Compaction

12. The Compaction Bill

13. Compacted Retrieval

14. The Compaction Threshold

15. Verbatim Tail

16. Stateless API

17. Retrieval Cost

18. Context Tax

19. Quadratic Cost

20. Cost Forecast

Compacting is itself a call to the model, and it is billed like any other. The model reads the whole window to write the summary, system prompt included, and that is the input. Then it writes the summary one token at a time, and that is the output, priced several times higher. So a summary that is a quarter the size of the history is nowhere near a quarter of the bill.

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⬇ The Compaction Bill worksheet (3 pages)

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Next:
13. Compacted Retrieval