tune-skills-and-agents
Installation
SKILL.md
Tuning skills, subagents, and their context layout
This skill is about making skills and subagents cheaper per use and more correct, and about not getting fooled by plausible-but-wrong intuitions while doing it. The guidance here is empirically grounded — the headline verdicts below came from A/B tests, and a few of them overturned the "obvious" design. When you apply this skill, you measure before you presume.
The one mental model: hot vs cold
Every piece of context lives in one of two states. Internalize this — every decision flows from it.
| state | where it lives | cost |
|---|---|---|
| HOT | CLAUDE.md, an agent's .md body, a skills:-preloaded SKILL.md, the system prompt |
in context every turn / every invocation — paid N times |
| COLD | references/*, a blueprint doc, any file reached by Read/Grep |
paid only when read — a tool call away |
The whole game is putting the right things in the right state. Hot is a standing tax; cold is pay-per-use. Optimizing is mostly moving rarely-needed detail from hot to cold, and keeping hot to {what's needed almost every time + what must never be skipped}.