Am I dumb or does this chart make no sense? Or why does the line only go up even with compaction? Or maybe "overall trajectory size" is hiding some meaning I don't understand?
The chart makes sense and is describing the cumulative cost of a trajectory. Cache tokens are created when a trajectory’s prefix is used more than once. A larger pre-compaction context window means that a greater number of cache tokens are used per turn, and a larger number of turns are completed before compaction runs. So you get a cumulative cost that grows quadratically until the compaction event.
How can the overall trajectory length be the same across reasoning efforts? I don't see how this is possible even if reasoning is not included in the trajectory length calculation.