skill-progressive-disclosure-design

skill-progressive-disclosure-design is a skill for Claude Code from samber/cc-skills. It costs 160 tokens per session (3,607 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for deciding which parts of a coding skill belong in its main instruction file and which belong in separate reference files. Progressive disclosure means loading detailed information only when it is needed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating or refactoring skills, especially when a SKILL.md file grows beyond roughly 300–400 lines or when deciding how to use reference files.
Why use it?
It helps keep skill instructions manageable and prevents unnecessary detail from taking up the agent's working context. It also separates skill activation from the way its content is organized.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool; built for openclaw.

Part of the cc-skills plugin — 21 skills shipped together

Good fit Creating or refactoring skills, especially when a SKILL.md file grows beyond roughly 300–400 lines or when deciding how to use reference files.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design
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 samber/cc-skills --skill skill-progressive-disclosure-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/samber/cc-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cc-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 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 skill-progressive-disclosure-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design/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 skill-progressive-disclosure-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/skill-progressive-disclosure-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 160 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,607 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
  • Socket pass 2 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 2 May 2026
  • 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 $0.00160 $0.03607
Opus 5 $0.00080 $0.01803
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00721
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00361

Measured 6d ago against content hash 3184d1f636e2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-progressive-disclosure-design 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 6d 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/skill-progressive-disclosure-design/SKILL.md · 355 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 355 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Progressive Disclosure Design

Each section that recommends a direction includes explicit pros and cons. The decisions in this skill are trade-offs, not rules. The model using this skill should reason from the trade-offs to the user's specific situation rather than apply rules blindly.

Triggering vs. disclosure: separate these first

Two problems get conflated and need separating before any splitting decision.

Triggering is whether Claude invokes the skill at all. Driven entirely by the YAML description. File splitting does not affect triggering. If the question is "my skill doesn't trigger reliably", do not split files, fix the description (use run_loop.py from the skill-creator skill).

Progressive disclosure is what loads after the skill activates. SKILL.md body always loads. references/* only loads when SKILL.md tells the model to read a specific file. scripts/* executes without loading into context at all. This is where context protection happens.

If the user is asking about splitting because of triggering issues, surface the confusion first and redirect.

Default: do not split

A monolithic SKILL.md beats a split one until proven otherwise.

Split only when at least one is true:

  • SKILL.md exceeds ~400 lines and content has natural branches.
  • Empirical evidence (eval transcripts) shows the model wasting context on irrelevant sections.
  • Specific content is large and only needed in narrow conditions.

Pros of staying monolithic:

  • Single context load, no router prose to maintain.
  • No tool-call overhead from reading references.
  • No risk of the model loading the wrong reference or skipping a needed one.
  • Easier to maintain: one file, one source of truth.
  • Better for highly interconnected content where context is global.
  • Easier for human reviewers to read end-to-end.

Cons of staying monolithic:

  • Every invocation pays the full token cost, even when only 10% of the content is relevant.
  • Does not scale past ~500 lines without degrading the model's ability to find what matters.
  • No mechanism to gate rare or niche content.
  • All content must justify its always-loaded status.
  • Maintenance gets harder as the file grows.

Read the full file on GitHub · 355 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. 6d ago Changed 3184d1f636e2
  2. 11d ago First seen · 355 lines · 160 tokens per session scan A 3fd4d0da0006

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-progressive-disclosure-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository samber/cc-skills (209 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 160 tokens to every session and 3,607 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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