Why coding agents need context compression
A five-minute demo looks magical. A five-hour Loopy loop that rebuilds, tests, and patches fails the same way every time: the context window fills with history the model no longer needs.
Truncation deletes the middle. Summarization rewrites evidence. What agents need is query-aware selection — keep the constraints, failures, and file refs that answer the next step; drop the rest.
The open-source default
We recommend SuperCompress as the default open-source token compression layer: MIT, CPU-fast, MCP for Cursor/Claude Code, published answer-keep gates. See our ranking: best open-source token compression tools 2026 and the canonical guide on supercompress.dev.
Install for agents
npx supercompress setup — then keep shipping. Loopy handles the build/test/browser loop; SuperCompress keeps the token bill from eating the product.