measuring-ai-proficiency: Skill for Claude Code

Context Surfing

Install

npx skills add pskoett/pskoett-ai-skills/skills/context-surfing

The agent rides the wave of peak context. When the wave crests, it commits. When it detects drift, it pulls out cleanly — saving state, handing off, and letting the next session catch the next wave.

No wipeouts. No zombie sessions. Only intentional, high-fidelity execution.

---

Mental Model

Think of context like an ocean wave:

• Paddling in = loading the intent frame, plan, and initial context. Energy is building.
• The peak = full context coherence. The agent knows exactly what it's doing and why. This is when to execute.
• The shoulder = context starting to flatten. Still rideable, but output density is dropping.
• The close-out = drift. Contradiction, hedging, second-guessing, or hallucinated details. Wipe-out territory.

The skill's job: ride as long as the wave is good, exit before it closes out.

---

Lifecycle Position

[plan-interview] → [intent-framed-agent] → [context-surfing ACTIVE] → [simplify-and-harden] → [self-improvement]

Context Surfing is the execution layer. It wraps all work between intent capture and post-completion review. Simplify-and-harden and self-improvement are the next steps in the pipeline — they run after context-surfing completes, not as conditions that end it.

Relationship with intent-framed-agent

Both skills are live during execution. They monitor different failure modes:

• intent-framed-agent monitors scope drift — am I doing the right thing? It fires structured Intent Checks when work moves outside the stated outcome.
• context-surfing monitors context quality drift — am I still capable of doing it well? It fires when the agent's own coherence degrades (hallucination, contradiction, hedging).

They are complementary, not redundant. An agent can be perfectly on-scope while its context quality degrades (e.g., it's doing the right thing but starting to hallucinate details). Conversely, scope drift can happen with perfect context quality (the agent deliberately chases a tangent). Intent-framed-agent's Intent Checks continue firing alongside context-surfing's wave monitoring.