Instead of compaction, I very aggressively do everything with teams of subagents. The main agent keeps the high level context, and all of the nitty gritty detail and code details not needed by the main agent never even make it into the context.

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thejazzman a day ago | parent | next [-]

This used to be really effective and cheap, now it lights my quota on fire, even after I fix the config and restore smaller subagents instead of like-agents

Multiple (slow) conversations seems to be the efficient path for me the past week or so

	▲	Supermancho a day ago \| parent [-]
		That is how the majority of developers use AI. Aim small miss small and all that. What's great about AI is that you can ask many many small questions about big data dumps (like logs and stack traces), for relatively little usage.

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ljm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

How does that work out in terms of usage? I imagine that, unless you're on the highest tier subscription or have a no expense spared approach to agentic coding, then you're going to hit a wall pretty fast.

	▲	jmalicki a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's actually less token usage overall, since the gigantic context that builds up in the main agent is a huge driver of costs.