Context compression guide

Context compression for agents and RAG

Context compression turns oversized agent memory, retrieved documents, and logs into a smaller context that still answers the user's question.

By Arjun Shah - Creator of SuperCompress - Updated 2026-07-03

Why agents need context compression

AI agents accumulate context with every turn: conversation history, tool call results, code outputs. After 5-10 turns, a typical agent prompt can exceed 10,000 tokens.

Without context compression, cost balloons, latency increases, and quality degrades as the model sifts through noise.

RAG pipeline integration

from supercompress import Compressor
comp = Compressor()
def rag_with_compression(query, retriever, llm):
    docs = retriever.retrieve(query)
    context = "

".join([d.text for d in docs])
    result = comp.compress(context, query)
    return llm.generate(query, result.compressed_text)

Frequently asked questions

Should I compress before or after retrieval?

After retrieval. Retrieve broadly, then compress around the current question.

Can context compression improve latency?

Yes. Fewer prompt tokens reduce GPU prefill time.

Try it yourself

Paste your long prompt into the playground, ask a question, and see what SuperCompress keeps and removes. Free, no signup needed.

Open the Playground See benchmarks