English

Stingy Context: 18:1 Hierarchical Code Compression for LLM Auto-Coding

Computation and Language 2026-02-05 v2 Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering

Abstract

We introduce Stingy Context, a hierarchical tree-based compression scheme achieving 18:1 reduction in LLM context for auto-coding tasks. Using our TREEFRAG exploit decomposition, we reduce a real source code base of 239k tokens to 11k tokens while preserving task fidelity. Empirical results across 12 Frontier models show 94 to 97% success on 40 real-world issues at low cost, outperforming flat methods and mitigating lost-in-the-middle effects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.19929,
  title  = {Stingy Context: 18:1 Hierarchical Code Compression for LLM Auto-Coding},
  author = {David Linus Ostby},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19929},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 10 tables, 2 figures, 10 bibliographical references and 6 appendices

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:22:46.525Z