The first one is the unbounded one

Every delta context-bridge sends is clipped to fit: summary first, as much conversation as there is room for, the rest parked in a checkpoint the delta points at. I was careful about that budget.

Except on the first switch, which had no previous watermark and therefore inlined the whole conversation. On a small session you never see it. On a large one it becomes a multi-megabyte string passed as a single command line argument, spawn throws E2BIG, and the agent simply never starts. That is how the first live switch to OpenCode died.

The first case is the one that skips the machinery, because when you write it the machinery does not exist yet. Now the first switch is bounded like every other. Worth asking of any pipeline: what does the empty-state path skip that the steady-state path does?