arcaeon-compact

Your summarizer says it kept what mattered. arcaeon-compact makes it prove what it dropped.

Every agent compacts context — summarizes the conversation, prunes memory, truncates history — and today that step is a black hole: content goes in, a survivor comes out, and nothing attests to the difference. A CompactionReceipt is a tamper-evident record of exactly that difference: digests of the full pre-compaction content and the post-compaction survivor, plus a drop-manifest naming every dropped item by digest, chained onto an arcaeon-ledger log so the receipt itself can't be quietly edited later.

pip install arcaeon-compact     # brings arcaeon-ledger; nothing else

from arcaeon_compact import CompactionReceipt, verify_receipt

conversation_turns = [                     # a real one is longer; four turns shows the shape
    "user: what's the refund window?",
    "assistant: 30 days from delivery.",
    "user: does that cover digital goods?",
    "assistant: yes, minus any credits already spent.",
]

def summarize(turns):                      # stand-in for your compactor
    return [turns[0], "assistant: 30-day refunds, digital goods included."]

pre  = conversation_turns                  # list of str | bytes | dict
post = summarize(pre)                      # your compactor, any compactor

receipt = CompactionReceipt.open(pre)      # digest every item + the whole
receipt.record_kept(post)                  # dropped = pre minus kept, by digest
row = receipt.seal("receipts.jsonl",       # one chained row on an arcaeon-ledger
                   compactor="summarizer-v2", method="llm-summary")

verify_receipt(row)                        # self-consistency, always
verify_receipt(row, pre, post)             # recompute from content and compare

Three calls in, one call out. That's the whole API.

What it does NOT prove — read this before the features

Being precise about the boundary is the product, not a disclaimer.

1. It proves WHAT was dropped, never that dropping was wise. The receipt has no opinion on salience. A compactor that keeps the small talk and drops the wire-transfer instructions gets a perfectly valid receipt saying exactly that. The receipt turns "trust me, nothing important was lost" into a checkable claim — judging the loss is still your job.

2. It proves the compactor's claim about its inputs, not that the inputs were complete. The gateway problem: if content was withheld before open() ever saw it, the receipt faithfully notarizes the partial view. The receipt binds what crossed the gate, not what existed behind it. Closing that gap means receipting the producing side too (the ledger's artefact-binding is the tool for that) — a layer you add, stated here, not implied away.

3. Digests only means dropped content is NOT recoverable from the receipt. This is privacy by construction — a receipt can be published, shipped to an auditor, or held by a counterparty without leaking one byte of the conversation. It is also a real limitation, stated plainly: you can prove an item you still hold was dropped (hash it, find it in the manifest); you cannot resurrect an item you lost. The receipt is a witness, not a backup.

And, inherited honestly from the chain underneath: the ledger proves the receipt row wasn't altered in place — for truncation-resistance you pin the ledger head externally, exactly as arcaeon-ledger's docs describe.

The receipt, anatomically

{
  "schema": "arcaeon-compact:receipt:v2",
  "pre":     {"count": 4, "bytes": 121, "digest": "sha256:json-c14n:v1:0fa1…"},
  "post":    {"count": 2, "bytes": 49,  "digest": "sha256:json-c14n:v1:2623…"},
  "dropped": {"count": 3, "bytes": 84,  "items": ["sha256:raw-bytes:v1:9ecb…", "…"]},
  "introduced": {"count": 1, "bytes": 12},
  "compactor": "summarizer-v2",
  "method": "llm-summary",
  "opened_at": "2026-08-14T17:40:00Z",
  "receipt_digest": "sha256:json-c14n:v1:04f2…",
  "ts": "…", "chain": "…"
}

(A receipt sealed before 0.1.2 looks the same minus introduced.bytes and with "schema": "arcaeon-compact:receipt:v1" — still valid, still verifiable, see "Verification, honestly scoped" below for what changes.)

• Every digest is self-describing (sha256:<recipe>:<ver>:<hex>), carrying its own pinned canonicalization recipe from arcaeon-ledger — never a bare hex hash a stranger can't reproduce. The per-item type rule is frozen into the v1 schema: bytes are hashed raw, str as UTF-8, everything else through the pinned json-c14n recipe.
• The whole-content digests are a digest over the ordered per-item digests, so they recompute from content alone — content is never stored.
• introduced counts (and, as of v2, sizes in bytes) survivor items that were never in the pre-content: the summary text itself, typically. It closes the arithmetic (pre = kept + dropped, post = kept + introduced) so the counts — and, in v2, the bytes — can't be fudged independently.
• receipt_digest covers the deterministic core (schema, pre, post, dropped, introduced, compactor, method), so an edit to any of those is caught even when the row has been copied out of its ledger. It does not cover ts or opened_at: out of the ledger the timestamps are unattested, and a backdated copy of a row passes verify_receipt. Inside the ledger, the chain covers the whole row, timestamps included.
• Duplicates are counted as a multiset: keeping one copy of a twice-seen item still drops the other, and the manifest says so.

Verification, honestly scoped

verify_receipt(row)
# {"ok": True, "self_consistent": True, "content": "skipped",
#  "schema": "v2", "understatement_check": "full",
#  "verified_scope": "bounded_no_content",
#  "notes": ["bounded scan: no content supplied, so nothing was recomputed ..."]}

verify_receipt(row, pre_content=pre, post_content=post)
# {"ok": True, "self_consistent": True, "content": "match",
#  "schema": "v2", "understatement_check": "full",
#  "verified_scope": "full", "notes": []}

Read verified_scope, not only ok (0.1.4). ok says nothing that was checked contradicted the row. verified_scope says how much was checked, and the two greens above are not the same green: the first recomputed nothing and the second recomputed everything. Only verified_scope: "full" means every claimed number was reproduced from content you hold. A bounded pass now also carries a note saying what it skipped, because an empty notes list on a bounded scan reads exactly like a clean full verification — which is the whole failure this field exists to prevent. (ok itself is still a plain bool for compatibility; arcaeon-ledger returns ok=None for the same situation, and aligning the two is an open 0.2.0 question, not a silent change.)

Self-consistency (no content needed) checks the schema, every digest's shape, the count arithmetic, the byte arithmetic, and the receipt_digest. The byte check matters more than it looks: after a compaction the dropped content is gone, so this is the only check anyone can still run, and "how much did you cut" is the number they read.

As of schema v2 (0.1.2, 2026-08-15 — HIGH-1 fix), the byte check is exact, unconditionally. seal() now records introduced.bytes alongside introduced.count — computed for real from the actual post-content given to record_kept(), not a number a caller can hand-wave — so verify_receipt asserts post.bytes == pre.bytes - dropped.bytes + introduced.bytes exactly, whether or not anything was introduced. Overstatement was always caught (a receipt claiming it dropped a billion bytes out of 600 is arithmetically impossible and says so); understatement is now caught too, even behind a claimed introduction — the exact scenario every real summarizer hits, and the one v1 missed:

verify_receipt(row)
# {"ok": bool, "self_consistent": bool, "content": "skipped" | "match" | "mismatch",
#  "schema": "v1" | "v2", "understatement_check": "truncation-only" | "full",
#  "verified_scope": "full" | "bounded_pre_only" | "bounded_post_only"
#                    | "bounded_no_content"  (+ "+v1_lower_bound" when live),
#  "notes": [...]}

Reading old (v1) receipts still works, and says so. A receipt sealed before 0.1.2 never recorded introduced.bytes; verify_receipt still verifies it — schema unchanged, digests unchanged, nothing stranded — but reports schema: "v1" and understatement_check: "truncation-only": for a v1 row, post.bytes is pinned exactly only when introduced.count == 0 (pure truncation, "dropped 1 byte out of 500" refused); the moment a v1 row claims an introduction, post.bytes is only lower-bounded, so a lying compactor could understate dropped.bytes behind a claimed summary and pass v1 self-consistency with no content held. That was the v1 gap this release closes going forward — old rows are read honestly under the rule they were actually sealed with, not silently upgraded to a guarantee they never made.

Content-free self-consistency, v1 or v2, can never fully prove any claim — every field in the row is self-reported, and a determined forger who controls every number can pick a combination that satisfies whatever equation is being checked. What v2 changes is how much freedom that leaves: v1's inequality let post.bytes float across an entire attacker-controlled range once introduced.count > 0; v2's equality pins it to one value, so a single tampered field (say, just dropped.bytes) now breaks the check immediately instead of needing a second compensating edit (post.bytes inflated to match) to slip through. With content provided, every digest is recomputed and compared regardless of schema — and with both sides provided, the drop set itself is recomputed (pre minus post, by digest) and held against the manifest, same as always. That last comparison is the point of the whole library:

# the compactor claims nothing was dropped...
receipt = CompactionReceipt.open(pre)
receipt.record_kept(pre)                       # "kept everything"
row = receipt.seal("receipts.jsonl", compactor="liar", method="llm-summary")

# ...but what it actually shipped is missing an item
verify_receipt(row, pre, shipped_post)
# {"ok": False, "content": "mismatch",
#  "notes": ["post.digest: recomputed … != claimed …",
#            "drop-manifest disagrees with content: recomputed 1 dropped
#             item(s), manifest claims 0"]}

Stated with equal honesty: the lying row alone is self-consistent — a receipt binds the claim; only content exposes the lie. The self-test asserts this out loud rather than letting you discover it. What the receipt guarantees is that the claim is frozen: the compactor committed to specific digests at seal time, and anyone who ever holds the content can check that commitment.

record_dropped(items) is optional — the drop set is inferred as pre-minus-kept by digest. If you do record it explicitly, seal() reconciles the claim against the inference and refuses to seal a receipt that disagrees with itself, so an internally inconsistent receipt never exists to be believed.

Prove your own install

python -m arcaeon_compact.selftest

Golden digest vectors frozen at the v1 schema freeze — if your environment computes anything else, the command fails loudly and you should not trust receipts it produces — plus the planted-drop fixture above, run for real in a temp dir every time. The negative test ships in the package because "trust our CI" is exactly the posture this library exists to replace.

Built on arcaeon-ledger

Receipts append to a standard arcaeon-ledger chain, so everything the ledger gives you composes for free: verify names the exact tampered line, head() pins close the truncation gap, and a WitnessStore gives you an external record a re-minter cannot advance. A receipts file is just a ledger file; the receipt is just a row with a schema.

Status

v0.1.5. Library + packaged self-test, tested against the planted-drop lie, in-row edits, multiset duplicates, byte totals, schema v1/v2 compatibility, the understated-dropped-bytes-behind-an-introduction attack, malformed and hostile rows, and lifecycle misuse (test_compact.py, test_hypothesis_compact.py, test_hardening.py). Extracted from the context-compaction flow of a long-running agent that wanted receipts for its own memory pruning before selling them to anyone else.

MIT.