wicked-garden-agentic-context-engineering

wicked-garden-agentic-context-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from mikeparcewski/wicked-garden. It costs 68 tokens per session (1,134 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to managing the information given to AI agents, including conversation history, stored memory, and token limits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reduce token use, choose shared or separate agent state, design memory scopes, and decide when to load or summarize context.
Why use it?
Too much irrelevant context can increase cost and delay responses while making results less reliable. Poorly scoped memory can also make agents lose or mix up information.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the wicked-garden plugin — 147 skills, 5 commands, 1 agent, 13 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to reduce token use, choose shared or separate agent state, design memory scopes, and decide when to load or summarize context.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden/context-engineering
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 mikeparcewski/wicked-garden --skill context-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install wicked-garden, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills, 5 commands, 1 agent, 13 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 wicked-garden-agentic-context-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden/context-engineering.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden/context-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden/context-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikeparcewski/wicked-garden/context-engineering.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,134 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00068 $0.01134
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00567
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00227
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00113

Measured 7d ago against content hash 073eb51a8198, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

wicked-garden-agentic-context-engineering 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 7d 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/agentic/context-engineering/SKILL.md · 143 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context Engineering

Techniques for managing context windows, optimizing token usage, and designing efficient memory systems for agentic applications.

Context Window Fundamentals

Context Window: Maximum tokens an LLM can process in a single request (input + output).

Limits vary by provider and model. Check the active model's documentation for the exact value.

Token Efficiency Matters:

  • Cost: Charged per token (input + output)
  • Latency: More tokens = slower response
  • Quality: Irrelevant context can confuse model

State Management Patterns

Pattern Use when Pros Cons
Shared Agents need synchronized view Consistency, simple coordination Contention, single point of failure
Isolated Agents operate independently No contention, parallel execution Inconsistency possible, harder to coordinate
Checkpointed Long-running processes, need recovery Fault tolerance, replayability Storage overhead, consistency complexity

Token Optimization Techniques

1. Aggressive Summarization

Compress old context into summaries to reduce token usage.

2. Selective Context Loading

Only load relevant context based on the current task.

3. Structured Compression

Use JSON/structured formats instead of prose to reduce tokens.

Example:

  • Before: "The user's name is John Smith..." (verbose)
  • After: {"name": "John Smith", ...} (compact)

4. Lazy Loading

Load details only when explicitly needed.

5. Reference Instead of Embedding

Reference external documents instead of embedding full text.

See refs/selective-loading.md and refs/caching-and-optimization.md for code examples and detailed strategies.

Memory Patterns

Memory Scope Size Retention
Short-term (working) Current session/task 1K-10K tokens Minutes to hours
Long-term Cross-session, permanent Unbounded (vector DB) Days to forever
Episodic Historical events Summaries stored Varies by importance

Read the full file on GitHub · 143 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 7d ago First seen · 143 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 073eb51a8198

Subscribe to this mod's changes

wicked-garden-agentic-context-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikeparcewski/wicked-garden (9 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,134 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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