Claude Code skills can be silently dropped from context when their listing budget overflows

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Claude Code includes every installed skill's name and description in the model's context on each turn, whether or not it is used. The listing is capped at 1% of the context window, and when it overflows, descriptions of the least-used skills are removed without any UI warning, only a debug log entry. Skills left without descriptions can no longer be matched to user requests and effectively stop being selected. The author built skill-tax-cli, a dependency-free Python tool that measures each skill's token cost, replays the overflow rule, and exits non-zero when skills would lose their descriptions, making it usable in CI. The tool also measures rules, memory files, and MCP configs, and token counts are rough estimates based on characters divided by four.

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