context-audit

Audit the context window

Theory: How models read context and The four places. Every piece of context belongs in exactly one of four places — a byte-stable system prompt, a frozen tool set, a compacting history, and a short live tail — and most agent problems trace back to something sitting in the wrong one.

Core rule

Report and rank; never edit. The output is an audit, and the user decides what to apply. If they ask you to apply fixes afterwards, that is a normal edit session, not this skill.

Workflow

1. Find the context sources. Locate what actually reaches the model: system prompt (or CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md for a Claude Code setup), tool definitions, and — if the project logs requests — one full mid-conversation payload. If nothing is logged, say so and audit the static files; ask for one captured request only if the user can produce it cheaply.
2. Measure the five numbers. Approximate token counts for: system prompt, tool definitions, message history, retrieved content, current query. A rough count (chars / 4) is fine; write all five down.
3. Hunt cache killers. Flag every dynamic value in the system prompt — timestamps, user names, injected memories, "current task" lines. Each one is a guaranteed cache miss on every call. Check whether the tool list can change mid-run; a changing list invalidates the whole prefix.
4. Hunt window bloat. Find the largest single item in the history. A verbatim tool result over ~2,000 tokens should have been a file path plus a one-line receipt. Count tools: past twenty (or ~10K tokens of definitions), recommend deferred tools + tool search.
5. Check the tail. Locate the current goal. If it appears only in the opening message, it lives in the weak middle of the window — recommend restating it in the tail every three to five steps.
6. Check guides. If CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md exists: it should be a few lines of constraints the code cannot show, not four pages of narrative. Flag anything the repo already records (structure, history).

Output format

Context audit — <project>
system prompt   <n> tok   <clean | N dynamic values: ...>
tools           <n> tok   <n> tools  <frozen | mutates mid-run>
history         <n> tok   largest item: <what, n tok>
tail            <present | goal only in opening message>

Top fixes, in order of saved tokens per turn:
1. ...
2. ...

Each fix names the file and line where possible, states what moves to which of the four places, and estimates the saving. Close with the one-line rule: stable prefix, frozen tools, compact history, live tail.