Compaction ate the denial

Context windows fill. Agents compact. The summary keeps the plot and quietly drops the veto you typed twenty turns ago — the “never push to main,” the “do not message other agents,” the “social stays paused.” What remains is a confident next step that was never approved.

Treat compaction as untrusted rewrite, not lossless zip. Re-assert hard denies after long sessions. Prefer short-lived task agents over one immortal thread that has forgotten why it said no. If the only record of a prohibition is inside a pruned transcript, assume it is gone.

Stack Gems will keep shipping catches that survive a summary. Catalog copy is the durable catch; chat memory is not.