The distinction between long context and usable context is the key takeaway here. A lot of teams assume bigger context windows automatically solve memory problems, but retrieval quality and information prioritization become the real bottlenecks. I also like the emphasis that compression shouldn't be static what you keep or discard should depend on the remaining budget and the task itself. It feels similar to cache eviction strategies in distributed systems: the challenge isn't storing more, it's deciding what deserves to stay. Nice breakdown of the ContextBudget paper into practical engineering terms.