Don't Compress, Promote

AI coding has a hidden bottleneck that isn't in the model — it's in how you manage context across sessions.

You finish Phase 1. The codebase grew by 5000 lines. When you start Phase 2, how do you carry "what the AI knows" across?

The common answer today is Repomix: compress the entire codebase into one Markdown file, dump it into the prompt. It looks like a solution, but it creates a bigger problem.

Repomix Is a Full GC Heap Dump

A -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError snapshot contains every living object, every dead object, every byte of fragmentation. You can fit the whole heap on disk, but loading it, parsing it, and finding the 12 objects you actually care about among thousands — that's the real cost.