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Context degradation review

Skill markoblogo/abvx-agent-skills/skills/context-degradation-review

Reviewable capability layer for coding agents. Portable skills, delivery gates, workflow patterns, and verification-first engineering.

Install
npx -y skills add markoblogo/abvx-agent-skills --skill context-degradation-review

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

  • 4 stars4 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

Review agent work for context poisoning, lost-in-the-middle failures, distraction, context clash, and stale carryover. Use before long-session handoffs, SET runner handoffs, skill changes, memory writes, or any task where too much or conflicting context may degrade behavior.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

2.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Context Degradation Review

Use this skill to find when the context itself is making the agent worse.

Use When

  • a long session, handoff, or compaction summary may contain stale or conflicting instructions;
  • a SET bundle, AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, or memory write mixes useful facts with outdated task history;
  • the agent keeps optimizing for irrelevant prior work;
  • tool output, logs, or retrieved docs may bury the decisive evidence;
  • multiple sources disagree and the answer treats them as one coherent contract.

Failure Modes

  • lost-in-middle: key constraints are present but buried between low-signal material.
  • context-poisoning: incorrect, stale, or speculative text is treated as authority.
  • distraction: large but irrelevant context pulls work away from the current task.
  • context-clash: two instructions, docs, memories, or artifacts conflict.
  • stale-carryover: a prior goal continues after the user changed or stopped the task.

Workflow

  1. Identify the active task, current authority order, and expected output.
  2. List the context sources used: user message, repo files, memory, docs, tool output, web sources, generated summaries.
  3. Mark each source as authoritative, supporting, stale-risk, or irrelevant.
  4. Check for the five failure modes above.
  5. Propose the smallest context repair:
    • remove or ignore a stale source;
    • promote the decisive constraint near the active plan;
    • split task history from durable guidance;
    • ask for clarification only when the conflict blocks action;
    • rewrite a handoff or memory proposal with source boundaries.
  6. Continue only after the active context is narrow enough to act safely.

Output Shape

Use:

  • verdict: CONTEXT_OK, CONTEXT_DEGRADED, or CONTEXT_BLOCKED;
  • active task;
  • context sources reviewed;
  • degradation findings by mode;
  • smallest repair;
  • remaining risk.

Guardrails

  • Do not use this as a generic writing critique.
  • Do not remove context just because it is long; remove or demote it only when it is low-signal, stale, or conflicting.
  • Do not treat memory as higher authority than the current user message.
  • Do not let stale rollout context override an explicit stop, pause, or changed task.

Provenance

Adapted from context degradation patterns in muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering, narrowed into an ABVX review lens.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 328,083. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.