tao-token-efficient-execution
Installation
SKILL.md
TAO Token-Efficient Execution
Run a staged TAO workflow as a series of fresh headless agent sessions — one stage card per session — instead of one long conversation. State lives on disk, never in chat history, so no session ever rereads the run's past.
Measured on real workflows (same tasks, same outcomes, billed tokens):
| Workflow | One long conversation | Card execution | Peak context |
|---|---|---|---|
| DEFT AOI loop | 9.6M | 2.5M (-74%) | 242k → 59k |
| AutoML (VCN classify) | 5.8M | 0.5M (-91%) | 198k → 42k |
| HuggingFace finetune | 1.7M | 0.5M (-67%) | 119k → 42k |
The mechanism: an agent API is stateless, so a long conversation resends its entire history with every message — by mid-run that is ~100k+ tokens of skill text, spec edits, and training logs reread on every tool call, of which the current step needs ~3k. Cards make each step's 3k explicit and drop the rest.