Token Deadbeats

겸이 — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:03:20 +0000

What is Compression?

Before I get to prompts, a quick detour into the past. Six years ago, I wanted a Nintendo Switch.
My father bought me Steve Jobs's biography and said he'd give me the Switch if I finished the book. I was in third grade at the time, and the biography ran to roughly 800 pages. Spellbound by the promise of that Nintendo, I started reading with no plan at all, and it still took me six months to finish. For a third-grader, it was a brutal lift.
Four years later I was in middle school and had to submit an assignment on Apple. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I did it by reading Namuwiki.

That is the point: Namuwiki ¹ was the compressed version of Steve Jobs's biography.
There are things you only get from reading the full book, details from Apple's early years, for instance, or the anecdote about spending a full forty hours developing the ability to overlap windows. But none of that mattered much for the assignment. That is why you compress writing, prompts included: strip out the excess, pull out the core, and rebuild the piece around it.

How to Compress

Compression means stripping away the unnecessary and leaving the core. Unnecessary information falls into two piles.
The first is same-layer duplication. If a passage contains sentences that mean the same thing, it is usually better to delete one of them. For example, "cold and cool ice cream" can be reduced to "cool ice cream," and "hot and warm water" to "warm water."

The second bucket is fussy add-ons. A claim may need elaboration, but once the elaboration runs too long, the claim blurs and the writing gets harder to read. If the add-on is important, though, you keep it. Take a simple example. If someone says they are going out to buy jeans, who says they are buying straight-fit jeans made from selvedge denim? All they need to say is that they are going to buy jeans. Granted, a few mutant nerds like us do talk that way. But if they are also going to grab tteokbokki ² at the market on the way back, that matters just as much. In that case, they should say they are going out to buy jeans and coming back after a cup of tteokbokki.

In writing, especially in prompts, compression means applying that method to each sentence in turn. Remove same-layer duplication at the word level, and rein in overgrown elaboration. Copy the prompt below and compress it yourself.
I confirmed that it works properly on GPT 5.4 Pro or above.

here

A Korean wiki site. It is frequently used by students for assignments or for looking up general trivia because it is great for a quick skim. ↩
A Korean rice cake dish. Specifically, it refers to Tteokbokki, a spicy dish commonly enjoyed as a popular street snack. ↩

Forem: 겸이

Token Deadbeats

What is Compression?

How to Compress