compress

compress is a skill for Codex from owainlewis/agent-skills. It costs 62 tokens per session (492 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing tool for shortening prompts, specifications, plans, notes, and other instructions while keeping their meaning and required behaviour.

In plain words
What is it for?
Compressing instructions and technical documents so they use fewer words or tokens while preserving important details.
Why use it?
It removes repetition and unnecessary wording without dropping facts, rules, examples, edge cases, or checks that affect the result.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Good fit Compressing instructions and technical documents so they use fewer words or tokens while preserving important details.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owainlewis/agent-skills/compress
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 owainlewis/agent-skills --skill compress
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/owainlewis/agent-skills

Made for: Codex.

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/owainlewis/agent-skills/compress.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owainlewis/agent-skills/compress)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owainlewis/agent-skills/compress"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owainlewis/agent-skills/compress.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 492 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 $0.00062 $0.00492
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00246
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00098
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00049

Measured 8d ago against content hash a495f45bb1e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

compress 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 8d 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/compress/SKILL.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Compress

Shorten the input without losing meaning.

Use this for information and instructions, not ordinary prose polishing. Use deslop when voice and writing quality are the main problem.

Process

  1. Identify the purpose and intended reader or agent.
  2. Extract the required content: facts, actions, inputs, outputs, constraints, defaults, examples, edge cases, checks, and stop conditions.
  3. Remove repetition, throat-clearing, backstory, generic advice, motivational language, and structure that does not change understanding or behaviour.
  4. Replace vague phrases with a concrete instruction only when the source supports it. Otherwise cut them.
  5. Merge overlapping rules and place each fact once, where the reader needs it.
  6. Rewrite in plain words and the smallest structure that preserves the logic.
  7. Compare the result with the source. Restore anything whose removal changes the likely interpretation or outcome.

Keep

  • facts, numbers, names, paths, commands, schemas, and citations
  • explicit scope, priorities, and exceptions
  • requirements created by past failures
  • defaults that resolve real ambiguity
  • examples that define a format or expose an edge case
  • verification, failure behaviour, and stop conditions
  • useful voice when compressing a brain dump or note

Cut

  • repeated goals, summaries, and conclusions
  • obvious preambles and narration about the document
  • baseline advice such as "be thorough" or "use good judgement"
  • adjectives such as "robust," "polished," and "production-ready" without a test
  • hedging that does not change confidence or responsibility
  • examples that merely repeat the rule
  • headings, bullets, or steps that add shape but no meaning
  • synonyms for a term already named clearly

Test every cut

Ask: if this disappears, could a capable reader act differently or lose a fact, limit, decision, warning, or piece of voice?

If no, cut it. If yes, keep it or rewrite it more clearly.

Return only the compressed result unless the user asks for a summary of changes.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 8d ago First seen · 50 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A a495f45bb1e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compress is a skill published in the GitHub repository owainlewis/agent-skills (44 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 492 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories