strategic-compact

Guidance for manually shortening an AI work session's context at logical workflow boundaries. Context is the information available to the agent while it works.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after exploration, planning, debugging, or a completed milestone, while keeping related implementation details together.
Why use it?
It helps keep current plans and decisions clear when earlier exploration or debugging details are no longer needed.

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/cloudnative-co/claude-code-starter-kit/strategic-compact
Any agent
npx skills add cloudnative-co/claude-code-starter-kit --skill strategic-compact
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cloudnative-co/claude-code-starter-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 249 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 $0.00025 $0.00249
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00125
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00050
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00025

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8811d77c1390, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

strategic-compact 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.

skills/strategic-compact/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Strategic Compact Skill

Compact at logical boundaries of your workflow when context has gone stale. Check the statusline for actual context usage before deciding — do not guess from tool-call counts or elapsed time.

When Compacting Pays Off

  • After exploration, before execution — Compact research context, keep the implementation plan
  • After completing a milestone — Fresh start for the next phase
  • Before major context shifts — Clear exploration context before a different task

Best Practices

  1. Compact after planning - Once plan is finalized, compact to start fresh
  2. Compact after debugging - Clear error-resolution context before continuing
  3. Don't compact mid-implementation - Preserve context for related changes
  4. Trust the harness - Auto-compaction and the statusline context meter are reliable; manual /compact is an optimization at phase boundaries, not a requirement
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 · 27 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 8811d77c1390

Subscribe to this mod's changes

strategic-compact is a skill published in the GitHub repository cloudnative-co/claude-code-starter-kit (147 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 249 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.