Episode Details

Installing a Claude Code skill is never free: its name and description take up permanent space in the agent's context, even if it's never used. As skill libraries grow, agents end up spending their working memory on metadata instead of the actual job. This episode digs into progressive disclosure — the three-tier loading architecture behind Agent Skills — and why it postpones the cost without eliminating it. We look at what a 55,000-skill analysis revealed about routing descriptions, how Codex budgets skill metadata at roughly 2% of the context window, and what workday's library-scaling tests showed about the tradeoff between fewer tokens and faster completion. Then we separate the real numbers from the marketing ones: what "70% token savings" actually measures, why tool-schema proxies inflate the headline, and how a PayPal deployment cut tool context from 140,000 tokens to 1,300. If you're building a discovery gateway, a repository scratchpad, or just wondering why your agent keeps looking up how to look things up — this one's for you. Key sources: • Anthropic Engineering — https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills • Claude Code Docs — https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills • Claude Platform Docs — https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/overview Episode 6235 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6235 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/864591)