context-optimization

context-optimization is a skill for Claude Code from muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering. It costs 47 tokens per session (3,030 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of techniques for fitting more useful information into an agent's limited context window, which is the amount of text it can consider at once. It includes filtering, caching, retrieval limits, and splitting context across agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to manage token budgets, shorten tool observations, improve cache reuse, limit retrieval to relevant material, and decide when to mask, compact, or partition context.
Why use it?
Large prompts and tool outputs increase cost and can bury the details an agent needs. These techniques reduce irrelevant context while preserving useful information.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the context-engineering plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to manage token budgets, shorten tool observations, improve cache reuse…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/context-optimization
About the project

Agent Skills for Context Engineering is a collection of reusable instructions that teach AI agents how to manage their context, coordinate multi-agent systems, and evaluate behavior. Developers use it when building or debugging production agent systems, and the catalogue entries are skills, agents, instructions, and a plugin from this collection.

muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering · 17,927 stars · on GitHub

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 muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering --skill context-optimization
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install context-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 context-optimization

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/context-optimization.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/context-optimization)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/context-optimization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muratcankoylan/agent-skills-for-context-engineering/context-optimization.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,030 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 5.1 $0.00047 $0.03030
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01515
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00606
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00303

Measured 7d ago against content hash 8cecc30872ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

context-optimization 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/compaction.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

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/context-optimization/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context Optimization Techniques

Context optimization extends the effective capacity of limited context windows through strategic compression, masking, caching, and partitioning. Effective optimization increases useful capacity without requiring larger models or longer windows — but only when applied with measurement discipline. The techniques below are ordered by impact and risk.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

  • Context budgets or token costs constrain task complexity
  • Observation masking can replace verbose tool outputs with retrievable references
  • Prefix or KV-cache hit rate needs improvement
  • Retrieval scoping can reduce irrelevant loaded context
  • Context partitioning can extend effective capacity across agents
  • Budget triggers are needed for masking, compaction, or partitioning

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

  • Explaining why attention or context windows behave this way: context-fundamentals.
  • Diagnosing active lost-in-middle, poisoning, distraction, confusion, or clash: context-degradation.
  • Designing a structured handoff summary for a long conversation: context-compression.
  • Storing large outputs, plans, or logs as files: filesystem-context.

Core Concepts

Apply four primary strategies in this priority order:

  1. KV-cache optimization — Reorder and stabilize prompt structure so the inference engine reuses cached Key/Value tensors. This is the cheapest optimization when the runtime supports prefix caching: low quality risk, immediate cost and latency savings. Apply it first when stable prefixes exist.

  2. Observation masking — Replace verbose tool outputs with compact references once their purpose has been served. Tool outputs can dominate agent trajectories (claim-context-optimization-tool-output-dominance), so masking often yields the largest capacity gains. The original content remains retrievable if needed downstream.

  3. Compaction — Summarize accumulated context when utilization exceeds 70%, then reinitialize with the summary. This distills the window's contents while preserving task-critical state. Compaction is lossy — apply it after masking has already removed the low-value bulk.

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 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. 7d ago First seen · 220 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 8cecc30872ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

context-optimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering (17,927 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 3,030 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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