---
title: "Summarization / Compaction · agent retrieval pattern · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/memory/retrieval/summarization/
description: "Roll older conversation history into a running summary to stay within the context window."
section: "Memory · Retrieval"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Summarization / Compaction

Roll older conversation history into a running summary to stay within the context window.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

## How it works

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Stage | Harvest |
| Phase | Both |
| Used by | MemGPT (recursive summary)· LangChain summary memory· Claude compaction |

## Trade-off

Lossy, fine-grained detail is irrecoverably discarded into the summary.

## Basis

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.