I A/B tested compressed agent instructions and found the breaking point

Your AI coding agent reads its instruction files on every session start. CLAUDE.md, steering files, skills, rules. A typical power-user setup burns 15,000–20,000 tokens before you type a word.

I ran a controlled experiment: compressed my agent's instruction stack three different ways, tested each with identical prompts, and found exactly where compression breaks behavior.

The setup: 61KB loaded every session

My Kiro CLI agent loads this context on every session:

Source