The 64 KB window did its part: mission 01a0b803's judge read REPORT.md in full, 18,698 B untruncated, in one command. It then ran wc, head -120, tail -116, sed 1,120p and two greps against the same file — six commands re-reading content it had been given. Two causes, one of them mine. compact_earlier_results shrank that read to 800 bytes as soon as the next round's results arrived, so by the time the judge went to check a claim against the report, the report was gone from its context. The most recent round's results now stay whole, so a read survives the call that receives it and the one after; only older rounds compact. The quadratic term stays bounded — it was the SUM over rounds, and one extra whole round is linear. The system prompt never mentioned the budget. It now says a cat comes back complete unless the output says otherwise, not to re-read with head/tail/ sed/grep, to decide what to verify before reading, and that earlier rounds are shortened — so read in the round you intend to check. Still 13 checks / 9 requests on that mission; the measurement is the next one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WZb5A2kfVfjpdwSochkuHz