filesystem-context

A method for storing large or ongoing agent context in files, such as notes, tool results, and handoff information. It lets agents discover relevant information when needed instead of keeping everything in the conversation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for durable scratchpads, saved logs, cross-agent handoffs, filesystem-backed memory, and cleanup of temporary context files.
Why use it?
It prevents long tasks from overwhelming the conversation and preserves useful working information between steps or between agents.

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/docxology/template/filesystem-context
Any agent
npx skills add docxology/template --skill filesystem-context
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/docxology/template

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,199 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 95% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00049 $0.03199
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01599
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00640
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00320

Measured yesterday against content hash 16495df022fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

filesystem-context 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/filesystem_context.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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

This is a copy

95% identical to filesystem-context — 13 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/filesystem-context/SKILL.md · 304 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 304 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Filesystem-Based Context Engineering

Use the filesystem as the primary overflow layer for agent context because context windows are limited while tasks often require more information than fits in a single window. Files let agents store, retrieve, and update an effectively unlimited amount of context through a single interface.

Prefer dynamic context discovery -- pulling relevant context on demand -- over static inclusion, because static context consumes tokens regardless of relevance and crowds out space for task-specific information.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

  • Tool outputs are bloating the context window
  • Agents need to persist state across long trajectories
  • Sub-agents must share information without direct message passing
  • Tasks require more context than fits in the window
  • Building agents that learn and update their own instructions
  • Implementing scratch pads for intermediate results
  • Terminal outputs or logs need to be accessible to agents

Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills:

  • Semantic cross-session memory, entity tracking, or temporal knowledge graphs: memory-systems.
  • Conversation summarization, compaction, or durable handoff wording: context-compression.
  • Token-efficiency tactics that do not require file-backed storage: context-optimization.
  • Multi-agent topology or handoff protocol design: multi-agent-patterns.

Core Concepts

Diagnose context failures against these four modes, because each requires a different filesystem remedy:

  1. Missing context -- needed information is absent from the total available context. Fix by persisting tool outputs and intermediate results to files so nothing is lost.
  2. Under-retrieved context -- retrieved content fails to encapsulate what the agent needs. Fix by structuring files for targeted retrieval (grep-friendly formats, clear section headers).
  3. Over-retrieved context -- retrieved content far exceeds what is needed, wasting tokens and degrading attention. Fix by offloading bulk content to files and returning compact references.
  4. Buried context -- niche information is hidden across many files. Fix by combining glob and grep for structural search alongside semantic search for conceptual queries.

Read the full file on GitHub · 304 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 First seen · 304 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 16495df022fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

filesystem-context is a skill published in the GitHub repository docxology/template (19 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 3,199 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to filesystem-context, differing in 13 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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