Add Compaction Resilience principle#5
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Adds a fifth canonical principle, Compaction Resilience, as
docs/principles/compaction_resilience.md, with a matching entry in the principlesREADME.mdindex. Proposed and discussed in #4.Substantive case
Context auto-compaction is a property of the agent runtime, not of any domain or adopter. Any sufficiently long agent task crosses the boundary, and at that boundary an agent that has treated its context window as the source of truth tends to reconstruct deliverables from discarded context (memory) rather than observed reality — producing confident-sounding but fabricated results. This principle makes reality-based reporting structurally easier than memory-based reporting: treat impending compaction as a checkpoint, not a cliff; commit and push before the boundary; write resumption state to a durable, in-git location; and resume from committed artifacts rather than conversation history.
It fits this repository's scope (canonical agent-coordination principles for the git-coordinated model) and leans on the substrate the model already assumes — coordination state is git state — so it sits alongside the existing four rather than expanding scope into tooling or new layer concepts.
It composes with the current principles rather than overlapping them:
Provenance and shape
Proven at operator scope before this proposal (an operator umbrella has been running it as an
Origin=selfprinciple, with two tenants inheriting it in reference mode), so it is a validated pattern rather than a speculative one. The file follows the repository's file shape — title, one-paragraph scope note, generic canonical text with no operator- or tenant-specific examples.Closes #4 on merge. As maintainer-owned, the merge decision rests with the maintainer; happy to adjust the text in review.