Editorial

Context compaction has become the memory manager of every long-running agent. The two leading frameworks have made opposite choices about whether it destroys the record or merely hides it, and the standard meant to make it observable has settled on a flag that can never be false.

Compaction is the agent runtime's memory manager, the leading frameworks disagree on whether it destroys the transcript or merely hides it, and the only standard signal for it is a flag that can never be false.

OpenTelemetry's GenAI conventions describe token usage fourteen ways on a span and one way in a metric. The fourteen can be priced and get sampled; the one is kept in full and cannot tell a cached token from a full-price one. Cost attribution for agents is being built on the gap between them.

The only complete token signal in the GenAI conventions cannot tell a cached token from a full-price one, and everything that can price a call rides on spans tracing exists to discard, so AI cost attribution runs on a measurement nobody guarantees is complete.