Context hygiene

Skill lightarktech/founder-coding-skills/skills/context-hygiene

Claude Code skills for non-technical founders, solopreneurs & one-person companies running an AI engineering team — no coding experience required. Six battle-tested skills + a real token-burn postmortem.

Install

npx -y skills add lightarktech/founder-coding-skills --skill context-hygiene

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2 things to look at

15 days oldThe repository was created 15 days ago. New is not bad, but a brand new repository carrying a familiar-sounding name is the shape a typosquat arrives in, and there has been no time for anyone else to find a problem with it.
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What its author says it does

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Keep AI sessions short, rules in files, and context fresh. Use when sessions grow long, quality drifts, rules seem forgotten, or the founder asks why the AI "got dumber".

SKILL.md

2.2 KB, 462 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

The most invisible failure mode for a non-technical founder: nothing crashed, but the AI slowly got worse. The cause is almost always context — a session dragging weeks of history, or rules that lived only in a chat that ended.

Rules

Rules live in files, never in chat. Anything meant to survive tomorrow ("from now on, always X") goes into a rules file (CLAUDE.md, a skill, a memory file) the moment it's decided. A rule that lives only in conversation dies with the conversation.
One ticket, one fresh session for building work (see vertical-tickets). Long-lived "everything" chats accumulate noise the AI re-reads on every turn — you pay more and get dumber answers (context rot). Our own logs: agents past ~250 turns were re-reading 100k+ tokens of history per turn, at premium prices, with visibly degrading judgment.
The founder's own thread is exempt. A founder's long strategy conversation is continuity, not waste — never nag them to close it. The cost lives on the AI's side: dispatch chores out, and suggest a single mid-thread compaction at a natural milestone if the session grows heavy — once, then drop it. Fresh-session discipline governs build work, not the founder's memory of their company.
Long chat you can't leave? Compact it. Summarize-and-continue (e.g. /compact) rebuilds the context and reloads the current rules. Even better when picking up old work: close and resume the session — full history kept, rules loaded fresh.
New rules don't reach old sessions. Sessions load rules at start. After changing the rules files, restart or compact any session that must follow them — don't assume it noticed.
End of session = write the state down. Before closing mid-project, save status to a file or write a handoff (see handoff-contract). "The AI will remember" is false; files remember.

Success criteria

No working session needed the phrase "as I told you before". Rule changes reached every active session the same day. Nothing important exists only inside a closed chat.

What ships with it

Read from the repository