Minimize Reader Load

Portability (required)

This skill is part of the portable pstack pack.

1. Read the pstack capability contract and the adapter for the active coding agent before any helper delegation.
2. Prefer capability verbs (explore, implement, review, parallel, ask_user, verify, model_role) over vendor tool names.
3. Resolve models through model_role. Never require a vendor-specific model identifier.
4. When helper spawning is unavailable, run the work on the lead agent and state that fan-out was collapsed.

Maintainability is the work a reader must do to understand code. Track two axes:

1. Layers to trace. How many indirections sit between the question and the answer.
2. State to hold. How much hidden or mutable context the reader must keep in their head.

Why: Code is read far more than it is written. LOC, cyclomatic complexity, and "clean architecture" are proxies. Reader load is the thing that matters. The two axes are independent. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a 6-layer adapter stack. Guard both. This is the human analog of Guard the Context Window: working memory is finite for readers too.