principle-guard-the-context-window

principle-guard-the-context-window is a skill for Claude Code from chhoumann/t3-pstack. It costs 46 tokens per session (112 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A working-context guideline for keeping an AI coding session within the amount of text it can reason about reliably. It recommends limiting each phase and keeping summaries instead of repeatedly carrying large files or outputs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when planning work across many files, handling large outputs, or dividing broad tasks into smaller phases and delegated pieces.
Why use it?
It reduces degraded reasoning, lost details, and stalled work when a project or task produces more information than the session can hold.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the t3-pstack plugin — 62 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when planning work across many files, handling large outputs, or dividing broad tasks into smaller phases and delegated pieces.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window
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.

Any agent
npx skills add chhoumann/t3-pstack --skill principle-guard-the-context-window
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chhoumann/t3-pstack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install t3-pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 62 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for principle-guard-the-context-window

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for principle-guard-the-context-window

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chhoumann/t3-pstack/principle-guard-the-context-window.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 112 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00046 $0.00112
Opus 5.5 $0.00018 $0.00045
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00009 $0.00022
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00011

Measured yesterday against content hash af0b9dd70b43, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-guard-the-context-window 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 yesterday.

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

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/pstack/skills/principle-guard-the-context-window/SKILL.md · 13 lines

What it actually says

Guard the Context Window

Why: Context overflow degrades reasoning quality, creates compression artifacts, and halts progress.

Pattern:

  • Size phases and cap scope. Limit files per phase, set turn budgets, account for mechanism costs.
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. yesterday Changed af0b9dd70b43
  2. 3d ago First seen · 13 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 6db84b7d5e67

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-guard-the-context-window is a skill published in the GitHub repository chhoumann/t3-pstack (190 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 112 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-13.

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