the compaction does not compact whole context, but keeps last ~20k tokens as is, I believe this helps a lot to model to not get confused what it is doing right

the compaction does not compact whole context, but keeps last ~20k tokens as is, I believe this helps a lot to model to not get confused what it is doing right now. it also have soft/soft compaction limit, it tries to compact on turn boundary when possible. with combining with above this can get you about 35% more context (at least it looks like this with the sol) codex when shell command is executed, will pull output with hard cap at max 30s, so for running compilation it will burn tokens without any benefit. I have some tasks where agent will have to run some suite that can take over an hour, and codex burns about $20/h just waiting and reasoning every 30s "yep, that's still running". And what is going to happen after compaction, when whole context was just waiting? it will loose the plot and when I'm back it just does completely different thing that I asked it to do. codex also have a bug, that opening refuses to resolve that adds your last steer after compaction, so imagine that you asked it to cleanup some tmp files or refactor/simplify something. it will do that again and again after each compaction, best case it just burns tokens and figures out, this is already done, or worse do it again and mess up everything and forget about it's task