The gateway's session hygiene pre-check uses a rough char-based token
estimate (total_chars / 4) to decide whether to compress before the
agent starts. This significantly overestimates for tool-heavy and
code-heavy conversations because:
1. str(msg) on dicts includes Python repr overhead (keys, brackets, etc.)
2. Code/JSON tokenizes at 5-7+ chars/token, not the assumed 4
This caused users with 200k context to see compression trigger at
~100-113k actual tokens instead of the expected 170k (85% threshold).
Reported by TigerHix on Twitter.
Fix: apply a 1.4x safety factor to the gateway pre-check threshold.
This pre-check is only meant to catch pathologically large transcripts
— the agent's own compression uses actual API-reported token counts
for precise threshold management.
67b9470207