strategic-compact

strategic-compact is a skill for Claude Code from mhylle/claude-skills-collection. It costs 137 tokens per session (1,600 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow aid that suggests saving a compact summary of the conversation at sensible points, such as between work phases or after debugging.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a task has multiple phases, a long research session, or a completed debugging cycle that should be checkpointed.
Why use it?
It helps preserve important decisions and unfinished work before the conversation becomes too long or is automatically shortened.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the NotebookEdit tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the devflow plugin — 38 skills, 13 agents, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when a task has multiple phases, a long research session, or a completed debugging cycle that should be checkpointed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact
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 mhylle/claude-skills-collection --skill strategic-compact
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mhylle/claude-skills-collection

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install devflow, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 38 skills, 13 agents, 5 hooks.

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 strategic-compact

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact/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 strategic-compact

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mhylle/claude-skills-collection/strategic-compact.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 137 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,600 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 3
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
  • high Memory Poisoning · line 42
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00137 $0.01600
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.00800
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00320
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00160

Measured 12d ago against content hash ad120f1fc8bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, 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 12d 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 · 163 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 163 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Strategic Compact

Suggest context compaction at logical boundaries — not arbitrary token thresholds. Auto-compaction is a safety net; strategic compaction is a workflow optimization that makes compaction feel like a natural pause instead of an interruption.


Why strategic > automatic

Auto-compaction fires on simple thresholds (token count, time). That creates real problems:

  • Mid-task disruption — auto-compact might fire while you're debugging, losing the mental model built up over many interactions.
  • Context fragmentation — arbitrary cutoffs create artificial boundaries in session history.
  • Lost continuity — "why" decisions get compacted away at random points rather than preserved at meaningful boundaries.
  • Incomplete state — mid-implementation compaction can lose partially completed work.

Strategic compaction instead:

  • Monitors for logical boundaries (task completion, phase transitions, successful commits).
  • Considers semantic state (actively debugging vs. between tasks).
  • Provides suggestions — never forces compaction.
  • Integrates with context-saver to preserve critical state first.
  • Respects workflow rhythm rather than imposing arbitrary limits.

Goal: compaction that feels like a natural pause, not an interruption.


When to use

Passive monitoring — via PreToolUse hook that attaches to every tool call, tracks counters, and evaluates boundaries. Hook setup → references/hook-setup.md.

Direct invocation:

  • /strategic-compact — check current session state and get a recommendation.
  • /strategic-compact status — view tool counts and threshold proximity.
  • /strategic-compact now — force a suggestion (auto-invokes context-saver first).

Trigger phrases: "should I compact", "when should I clear context", "getting long", "checkpoint", "context is getting big".


The core heuristic

Two questions:

  1. Has enough work happened that compaction is worthwhile? (weighted tool-call count vs. threshold)
  2. Is this moment a good place to compact? (logical boundary vs. mid-task)

Read the full file on GitHub · 163 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. 12d ago First seen · 163 lines · 137 tokens per session scan A ad120f1fc8bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

strategic-compact is a skill published in the GitHub repository mhylle/claude-skills-collection (18 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 137 tokens to every session and 1,600 once invoked, about $0.0007 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.

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