compress

compress is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from melodic-software/claude-code-plugins. It costs 233 tokens per session (4,289 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A writing tool for shortening Markdown documents while keeping their instructions, conditions, examples, and meaning intact.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to tighten README files, documentation, onboarding text, or agent instruction files.
Why use it?
It removes filler and repetition without silently changing what the document requires.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the docs-hygiene plugin — 11 skills shipped together

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/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/compress
Any agent
npx skills add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --skill compress
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install docs-hygiene, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills.

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 compress

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/compress.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/compress)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/compress"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/compress.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 233 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,289 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 $0.00233 $0.04289
Opus 5 $0.00117 $0.02145
Sonnet 5 $0.00047 $0.00858
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00429

Measured yesterday against content hash 04995323b335, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

compress scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 4 executable files (scripts/audit-scan.sh, scripts/audit-scan.test.sh, scripts/detect-caveman.sh, …), 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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

rm -rf "$(dirname "<absolute-path-from-step-1>")"
plugins/docs-hygiene/skills/compress/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pre-computed context

Current branch: !git branch --show-current 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown" Uncommitted .md files (empty = none matched or the probe returned nothing): !git status --porcelain >/dev/null 2>&1 && { git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null | grep -E '\.md"?$' | head -10; :; } || echo "(git status unavailable)"

Purpose

Markdown in docs/, README files, onboarding docs, third-party pasted prose, and drifted skill bodies accumulates FLAVOR. Filler ("just", "really", "basically"), hedging ("perhaps", "might"), articles, pleasantries. context/flavor-vs-content-matrix.md defines FLAVOR (safe to cut) vs CONTENT (never cut). The batch fan-out path (Phase A LATITUDE) is a word-level trimmer: mechanical drops + passive→active + nominalization only. No sentence-level restatement deletion. The single-file in-session Edit fallback may apply the full matrix taxonomy (including redundant restatement of bold rule names) behind the same semantic-diff net. Always-loaded instruction files (.claude/rules/**, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, **/SKILL.md) bound empirically at 2-3% yield (see ## Sources). Likely 5-15% yield on author-time-undisciplined content when the Edit fallback's broader latitude applies; batch fan-out yields are correspondingly smaller.

Methodology: snapshot original → backend mechanical compression (the caveman plugin via /caveman:compress, OR in-session Edit fallback) → spawn semantic-diff subagent comparing original vs condensed (output: SEMANTIC LOSS / AMBIGUITY / FALSE POSITIVE per finding with verbatim citations) → revert every SEMANTIC LOSS + AMBIGUITY → run markdownlint-cli2 → ship or revert.

Backend selection

Default-action Step B picks the mechanical-compression backend: the caveman plugin (marketplace caveman, invoked as /caveman:compress via the Skill tool) when present, otherwise the in-session Edit-based fallback. Caveman performs the mechanical flavor cuts (articles, fillers, hedging, verbose-verb collapses) as the compression backend. It is NOT the verification gate. Fallback policy is graceful: the in-session Edit-based path substitutes whenever caveman is absent or unwanted. Subsequent steps (semantic-diff dispatch, revert pass, markdownlint) wrap the output regardless of backend choice.

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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. yesterday First seen · 158 lines · 233 tokens per session scan C 04995323b335

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compress is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (15 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 233 tokens to every session and 4,289 once invoked, about $0.0012 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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