One plugin.json turns a shelf of skills into something you can switch off as a group
When I sorted my skills by what work they belong to, the set I open almost daily turned out to be 5 percent of the total. Here is how I dropped a .claude-plugin/plugin.json into each group so I could switch a whole shelf off, plus the two loading rules I tripped over on the way.
Don't let your verification script's full output flow back through a hook
The check was working the whole time. The conversation was what ran out of room. Measured side by side: 58 bytes from one scan of 833 files, 42KB from another. Which paths actually reach the model, and how to enforce a budget on them.
The Biggest Section in Your SKILL.md Is Usually the One to Keep
A skill I run every week cost about 10K tokens just to load. Measuring it section by section showed why the largest block was the one I had to leave in place, and what splitting by reach actually saved.
Now that forking is the default, review agents are the ones I still call by name
Subagent forking became the default, so delegated work now inherits the parent conversation. Work can inherit context. Judgment cannot. Here is how I declare that boundary in the repository and catch it drifting.
A 1M Context Window Is the New Default — So I Built an Admission Policy Instead of Filling It
Sonnet 5 is now the Claude Code default and native 1M context is standard. The hard errors disappeared, but a quieter kind of degradation took their place. Here is how I made it visible with a probe, plus an admission policy and an effective-token-cost view — with working code and my own measurements.