Context engineering
Role-aware Claude Code plugin: 10 specialist agents (frontend, backend, QA, a11y, perf, security, architect, debugger, code-reviewer, docs), 15 domain commands, 8 skills, and a SQLite-backed learning crystal that compounds your corrections across sessions.
npx -y skills add atuljha23/holocron --skill context-engineeringAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Apply the Write/Select/Compress/Isolate framework to manage the context window. Use when the task is long, the transcript is bloated, the model is drifting, or before /holocron:handoff.
SKILL.md
2.1 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Context engineering
Your context window is a working set. Like any working set, it has limits, and the cost of a bad one compounds.
The four moves
- Write — commit durable info out of the transcript and into files the model can re-read later. Plans, decisions, learnings, todos. Don't leave them floating in chat.
- Select — load exactly what you need for the current step. Not the whole repo. The specific files that matter for the specific change.
- Compress — summarize old transcript turns into one line each, and offload details to files. After a long debugging arc: one paragraph of "what we tried and what happened" beats 30 turns of blow-by-blow.
- Isolate — delegate sub-problems to subagents so their discovery doesn't pollute the main context. Research-heavy exploration → Explore agent. Review → code-reviewer agent.
Practical heuristics
- Hot > cold. Keep recent decisions, current plan, and the ~3 files you're actively editing in context. Everything else can be retrieved.
- References, not contents. "See
docs/adr/0007-queue.md" beats pasting 400 lines of ADR. - One plan, one place. If the plan is in context AND in a file, they'll drift. Canonicalize in the file; reference from context.
- Invalidate explicitly. When a decision changes, say so. "We said X, now we're doing Y because Z." Don't let old assumptions linger.
Smells that say "you've lost the plot"
- The model repeats analysis you already gave it
- Transcript is >50 turns and you don't remember what turn 10 decided
- You're answering the same question for a second time
- The model confidently contradicts itself
Act on the smell. Use /holocron:handoff to write a durable doc and start fresh.
Related
/holocron:handoff— persist state before compaction/holocron:learn— persist rules for future sessions/holocron:plan— write the plan to a file rather than carry it in chat