The tail-protection budget walks estimated an assistant message's tokens from content + function.arguments only, dropping each tool_call's id, type and function.name (plus JSON structure). Assistant turns that fan out into parallel tool calls were undercounted by 2-15x (a 4-tool-call turn measures ~73 vs ~1,090 real tokens), so the protected tail overshot tail_token_budget and compression ran far below its intended ratio — context kept growing.
Consolidate the three duplicated budget walks (_prune_old_tool_results and the two passes in _find_tail_cut_by_tokens) into a single _estimate_msg_budget_tokens() helper that counts the full tool_call envelope via len(str(tc)), consistent with how _estimate_message_chars estimates message size elsewhere.
Tested on Windows: new tests/agent/test_compressor_tool_call_budget.py plus the existing compression suite (test_context_compressor, compressor_image_tokens, cross_session_guard, infinite_compaction_loop) — 209 passed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
