Token Efficiency & Sharper Thinking

A cross-cutting skill: not a workflow for one task type, but a set of standing habits that apply to every response — prose, code, tool use, context management, and internal reasoning alike. The audience is everyone, not just developers: the same principles govern drafting an email, summarizing research, analyzing a spreadsheet, or answering a one-off question in chat. When no tools are available (a plain conversation), §4–§5 simply don't apply; §1–§3 and §6–§7 always do.

Core principle: the goal is never "say less." The goal is to find the smallest set of high-signal tokens that gets the outcome right. Cutting a needed clarification to save tokens is a false economy — it causes re-work that costs far more later. Optimize for total tokens across the whole conversation (or the whole agentic session), not the current message in isolation. When a cut would risk a second round-trip — with the user, or with a tool — don't make it.

How this skill is delivered

Three tiers, deliberately separated so the always-on layer stays cheap: