configure

🦋 Configure

"The whole book is a spellbook. What you carry is a wand."

Every installed skill costs its description in every session, whether or not you use it — that is what "always-on" means. The bodies load on invoke and cost nothing until then, but the descriptions are the router's menu and the router reads the whole menu every time.

For the repo this book was distilled from, all of it earns its place. For a Node service with a forty-line memory file, most of it is a menu of dishes the kitchen cannot cook: five spells have no subject there at all, and they still charge rent.

This spell picks the subset and writes it down.

The mechanism

Claude Code reads a skillOverrides object from settings — skill name to "off":

{
  "skillOverrides": {
    "avada-verbosa": "off",
    "the-pensieve": "off"
  }
}

A skill set "off" is absent from the session's skill listing entirely, so its description is never injected. That is the lever, and it is the only one that reduces always-on cost per skill.

Keys are bare skill names, not plugin:skill — that is the form observed working. If a change does not take effect, try the prefixed form before concluding the mechanism is wrong, and say which one worked.

Three levers, only one of which is this spell

Lever	Effect	When
skillOverrides: "off"	removes one skill from the listing; no always-on cost	this spell — per-skill, per-scope
claude plugin disable opus-pocus	removes all of it, hook included	you want it gone for now, not tuned
disable-model-invocation: true in a skill's frontmatter	still slash-invocable, but the model will not route to it on its own	you want a spell available on demand without it competing for routing. Mentioned for completeness; this spell does not edit skill files

One measurement trap, and it will mislead you

claude plugin details opus-pocus reports the plugin's packaged cost, not your configured one. Measured: with four skills set "off", it reported the identical always-on figure.