shed

# Shed — Context Hygiene for Agents

*Shed what you don't need. Keep what matters.*

Named for molting — the process of shedding an outer layer to grow. Your context window is your skin. When it gets too heavy, shed the dead weight.

## Core Principle

**Tool outputs are 84% of your context growth but the lowest-value tokens you carry.** (Lindenbauer et al., NeurIPS 2025 DL4C workshop, measured on SWE-agent). Everything flows from this.

## The Rules

### After Every Tool Call

1. **Extract, don't accumulate.** When a tool returns large output (file contents, search results, logs, API responses), immediately write the key facts to a file or compress into bullets. The raw output is now disposable.
2. **Ask: "Will I need this verbatim later?"** Almost never. The answer you extracted is what matters, not the 500 lines that contained it.

### When Context Reaches ~70%

3. **Trigger condensation.** Don't wait for the platform to compact you — that's losing control of your own memory. At 70%, actively shed.
4. **Mask old tool outputs first** (free, no LLM calls). Keep your reasoning and action history intact — you need your decision chain, not the raw `ls -la` from 20 turns ago.
5. **Summarize reasoning only as backup.** If masking isn't enough, compress old reasoning turns. But this is lossy and costs an LLM call — use sparingly.
6. **Never re-summarize a summary.** If you've already condensed once and context is growing again, switch context or spawn a sub-agent. Recursive summarization compounds errors.

### When Completing a Task

7. **Write results to file, then switch context immediately.** Stale completed-task context is anti-signal for your next task. Don't carry it.
8. **Leave breadcrumbs.** Before switching: write what you did, what's next, and where the files are to `memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md`. Future-you needs a trailhead, not a transcript.

### When Delegating Work

9. **Spawn fresh-context sub-agents for complex sub-tasks.** Your context is noise for their work....