reskill

A maintenance workflow for shortening agent instructions and moving repeated knowledge into shared skill files.

In plain words
What is it for?
It audits agent charters and histories, finds repeated patterns and mature lessons, creates or updates skills, and trims duplicated content.
Why use it?
It reduces repeated text that consumes each agent’s context and keeps team-wide guidance in one reusable place.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bradygaster/squad/reskill
Any agent
npx skills add bradygaster/squad --skill reskill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bradygaster/squad

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 12 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 795 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00012 $0.00795
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00398
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00080

Measured 2d ago against content hash 660f1992963a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reskill scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 2 lines differ
  • reskill — 95% identical, 184 lines differ
.copilot/skills/reskill/SKILL.md · 93 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 93 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

When the coordinator hears "team, reskill" (or similar: "optimize context", "slim down charters"), trigger a team-wide optimization pass. The goal: reduce per-agent context consumption by extracting shared patterns from charters and histories into reusable skills.

This is a periodic maintenance activity. Run whenever charter/history bloat is suspected.

Process

Step 1: Audit

Read all agent charters and histories. Measure byte sizes. Identify:

  • Boilerplate — sections repeated across ≥3 charters with <10% variation (collaboration, model, boundaries template)
  • Shared knowledge — domain knowledge duplicated in 2+ charters (incident postmortems, technical patterns)
  • Mature learnings — history entries appearing 3+ times across agents that should be promoted to skills

Step 2: Extract

For each identified pattern:

  1. Create or update a skill at .copilot/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md
  2. Follow the skill template format (frontmatter + Context + Patterns + Examples + Anti-Patterns)
  3. Set confidence: low (first observation), medium (2+ agents), high (team-wide)

Step 3: Trim

Charters — target ≤1.5KB per agent:

  • Remove Collaboration section entirely (spawn prompt + agent-collaboration skill covers it)
  • Remove Voice section (tagline blockquote at top of charter already captures it)
  • Trim Model section to single line: Preferred: {model}
  • Remove "When I'm unsure" boilerplate from Boundaries
  • Remove domain knowledge now covered by a skill — add skill reference comment if helpful
  • Keep: Identity, What I Own, unique How I Work patterns, Boundaries (domain list only)

Histories — target ≤8KB per agent:

  • Apply history-hygiene skill to any history >12KB
  • Promote recurring patterns (3+ occurrences across agents) to skills
  • Summarize old entries into ## Core Context section
  • Remove session-specific metadata (dates, branch names, requester names)

Step 4: Report

Output a savings table:

Agent Charter Before Charter After History Before History After Saved

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 93 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A 660f1992963a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reskill is a skill published in the GitHub repository bradygaster/squad (3,150 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 795 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.