July 21, 2026
School, apprenticeship, university, first job, my own company: every chapter compacted everything before it into a summary and made room for the new. Then the agentic era arrived, and the metaphor became a way of working. A personal retrospective told in context windows.
6 min read
Anyone who works with coding agents knows the moment. The context window is full, a status line appears, and everything that happened so far gets boiled down to a summary. The details drop away. What remains is what matters for the next step, and the work continues as if nothing happened.
This year I noticed: my life has been doing this all along.
Life chapters change everything at the root. Otherwise we would not call them that. School, apprenticeship, university, first job, first company of my own. Each an important, decisive span of my life, and each one compacted everything before it and opened up completely new, unexpected experiences. Every time, I ask myself the same question afterwards: what did I actually live through, and how does it help me with what comes next?
My apprenticeship started, and I was thrown deep into programming. First experiences with C#, simple terminal exercises, later desktop applications with WPF. For three years, that was my whole world, and it felt big.
Those years only became "simple" in hindsight, once I sat in university lectures. Truly laughable, I thought back then.
The first two semesters of my degree swallowed almost everything I had learned during my apprenticeship. Programming, math, business basics: three years of training, compacted into less than two semesters. It was my first compaction, even if I would not have called it that at the time.
Everything after that was new territory, and once again I had a proper fight on my hands. Assembly, Java, C++, OpenGL, Mathematica. Math concepts that made my head smoke, database structures, software architecture, project planning, team organization. And on and on.
It was a lot. Looking back, it was only a small beginning.
University ended, and I landed my first real job as a software developer. Finally everything got applied. The first project went live a few months after I started, and everything that came before was baked into it: years of theory and practice, compacted into two months of shipping.
Then the wheel spun faster. Customers arrived, bugs were reported, meetings were held, more prototypes were built, new frameworks were tested. A lot was new, again.
Looking back, I was still only a small cog, with an isolated environment and a clearly fenced area of responsibility.
I craved more and spent my free time programming my own projects. Projects I burned for, projects that solved my own problems. I decided to share them. A community formed, contacts were made, ideas were exchanged, things were built together. Wertarbyte was founded, first alongside the job, then fully on its own. Everything I knew and could do was compacted once more and poured into the company.
Building software? Known territory. Working efficiently in a team? Long solved. Distributing tasks in an organized way? Thanks, experience. It ran.
Then came everything I had no prior experience for. The GbR became a GmbH. First a small office, then a nicer neighborhood with the bigger team. Buying office furniture, establishing internal IT, wiring networks. Customer communication as the daily business, finances as the permanent topic. Plus dozens of areas I had never properly touched before.
In those years I wore dozens of hats and collected enormous amounts of knowledge, routines, confidence, and experience. And for the first time, hindsight has nothing to belittle. It was not "simple", not a small beginning, not a small cog. It was a holistic experience that could hardly be compacted.
Or so I thought.
It was 2025, ten years after the founding. After a very long drought of contracts I had to leave the job I loved and find a new one. I went to a former client and let them hire me. As a software developer.
Used to unfolding my compacted knowledge freely, I wanted to reach the next big iteration here as well. After Wertarbyte, that was not so simple. I am part of smaller teams and develop like every other developer. Now and then I feed in experience and give internal talks. I take on roles as Scrum Master or support product owners with planning and definition. Creating overviews is in my blood and my routine. How could I not.
By the end of 2025 the first projects at the new job were running, and I had time and energy for myself again. One question remained: how do I collect my next experiences at the pace I am used to?
✻ Compacting experiences…
Sascha falls into the agentic era. Autocomplete with AI? Everything suddenly moves faster. v0 builds me entire projects for under 20 euros? I can finally build prototypes and test ideas as fast as I can think them. New models appear every few weeks, like standing in a candy store. OpenCode gave me free access to everything, and my ideas blew past what seemed possible, and past my wallet. Claude Code and Codex inside the Zed IDE changed my workflow completely.
Half a year later I had turned every remaining idea in my head into a prototype. Brought never-built Wertarbyte brainfarts to life and gave them color. Built my own infrastructure, redid my hosting, redesigned my homepage, connected the projects. Never before have I been able to give my creativity and my inner engineer this much free rein.
And the holistic experience that could hardly be compacted? It could after all. Ten years of running a company now live in the prompts, skills, and routines I use to direct agents. The details are gone. What matters is there.
It is July 2026, and my compacted knowledge is exploding in an exponential environment. Everything feels powerful, dangerous, exciting, too much, and yet within reach, all at the same time. I am curious what comes next.
Because if the chapters so far have taught me one thing, it is this: at some point the context is full again. The status line appears, the details drop away, and what remains is the summary the next chapter builds on.
✻ Compacting experiences…
[insert next story here]
