prompt-and-context-engineering

prompt-and-context-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills. It costs 93 tokens per session (2,671 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide to writing instructions for language-model agents and deciding which information they should see during each request. It covers prompts, context windows, and keeping long conversations manageable.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or revise system prompts, reduce token use, organize long-running conversations, or troubleshoot agents that drift from their instructions.
Why use it?
It helps explain why an agent may ignore instructions, behave inconsistently, or waste tokens on irrelevant history. It provides ways to make the agent’s behavior clearer and more predictable.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex; mentions Gemini CLI.

Part of the ai-agent-skills plugin — 20 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or revise system prompts, reduce token use, organize long-running conversations, or troubleshoot agents that drift from their instructions.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills/prompt-and-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 selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills --skill prompt-and-context-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 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 prompt-and-context-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills/prompt-and-context-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills/prompt-and-context-engineering)
Your own site
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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 prompt-and-context-engineering

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills/prompt-and-context-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills/prompt-and-context-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,671 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 $0.00093 $0.02671
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01336
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00534
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00267

Measured 11d ago against content hash f51ebd22af27, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-and-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 11d 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.

plugins/ai-agent/skills/prompt-and-context-engineering/SKILL.md · 260 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 260 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt and Context Engineering

Purpose

Everything an LLM "knows" during a single call is whatever text is in its context window at that moment — there is no other channel. Prompt and context engineering is the discipline of deciding what goes into that window, in what order, in what format, and how it's kept from growing without bound as an agent runs. Done poorly, this produces agents that ignore instructions, contradict themselves across turns, burn tokens (and money) on irrelevant history, or become unpredictable as conversations grow long. Done well, it is what makes an agent's behavior consistent, debuggable, and affordable to run at scale. This is distinct from model selection or fine-tuning: it's about structuring information for a fixed model, which is usually the highest-leverage, lowest-cost lever available.

When to use

  • Writing or revising a system prompt for an agent, especially one with multiple instructions, tools, or output-format requirements.
  • The agent's behavior is inconsistent, ignores stated rules, or drifts as a conversation gets longer.
  • Deciding what belongs in the system prompt vs. a per-turn user message vs. a tool result vs. retrieved (RAG) content.
  • Reducing token usage / latency / cost on a working agent (also see llm-cost-and-latency-optimization).
  • Designing how conversation history is truncated, summarized, or windowed for a long-running session.
  • Debugging why the model's output format doesn't match what was requested.

Prerequisites & environment

  • Know your target model's context window size and, ideally, its documented behavior around very long contexts (many models show degraded attention to middle-of-context content, sometimes called "lost in the middle" — verify current behavior for your specific model rather than assuming a fixed rule).
  • Access to token-counting tooling for your model/SDK so budgets are measured, not guessed.
  • A test harness or even a handful of representative transcripts you can re-run after each prompt change — prompt engineering without a way to check for regressions is guesswork (see agent-evaluation-and-guardrails).

Read the full file on GitHub · 260 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 260 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A f51ebd22af27

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-and-context-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository selvarajmurugesan90/ops-engineering-skills (38 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 2,671 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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