Strategic compact

Skill TheophilusChinomona/idev/skills/strategic-compact

Suggests manual /compact at logical task boundaries (after exploration, planning, milestones) instead of arbitrary auto-compaction. Use when the user wants automatic /compact reminders, asks about managing context size, or when deciding whether to suggest compaction at a phase boundary.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add TheophilusChinomona/idev --skill strategic-compact

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SKILL.md

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Strategic Compact Skill

Suggests manual /compact at strategic points in your workflow rather than relying on arbitrary auto-compaction.

Why Strategic Compaction?

Auto-compaction triggers at arbitrary points:

Often mid-task, losing important context
No awareness of logical task boundaries
Can interrupt complex multi-step operations

Strategic compaction at logical boundaries:

After exploration, before execution - Compact research context, keep implementation plan
After completing a milestone - Fresh start for next phase
Before major context shifts - Clear exploration context before different task

What Claude should do when this skill loads

At phase boundaries (plan finalized, milestone complete, bug fixed, long exploration finished), suggest the user run /compact — briefly, with the reason.
When the PostToolUse hook below injects a [strategic-compact] reminder, treat it as a prompt to evaluate whether the current moment is a logical boundary; only suggest /compact if it is. Never suggest it mid-implementation.
Remind the user that durable state survives compaction: .claude/idev/smart-context/index.json, .claude/idev/project-map/project.map.md, and the other .claude/idev/ caches.

How the hook works

suggest-compact.sh (Unix) / suggest-compact.ps1 (Windows) run on PostToolUse with matcher Edit|Write:

Read the hook JSON from stdin and extract session_id
Increment a per-session counter file in the temp directory
Every N calls (default 50), emit hookSpecificOutput JSON on stdout, which Claude Code injects as additional context for Claude

Hook Setup

The hook is pre-registered by the plugin's hooks/hooks.json (PostToolUse, matcher Edit|Write) but off by default — the script exits instantly unless the per-project opt-in flag exists. Enable it with:

/idev:hooks enable compact

which creates <project>/.claude/idev/compact-suggestions-enabled. Disable with /idev:hooks disable compact. No settings.json editing, takes effect immediately.

<details><summary>Manual wiring (only if you can't use the plugin-registered hook)</summary>

Add to ~/.claude/settings.json — NOTE: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} is NOT expanded in user settings; use the absolute plugin path. The matcher is a regex over tool names, not an expression language:

{
  "hooks": {
    "PostToolUse": [{
      "matcher": "Edit|Write",
      "hooks": [{
        "type": "command",
        "command": "bash \"<idev-plugin-root>/skills/strategic-compact/suggest-compact.sh\""
      }]
    }]
  }
}

(Windows: powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "<idev-plugin-root>\\skills\\strategic-compact\\suggest-compact.ps1".) The opt-in flag file is still required either way.

</details>

Configuration

IDEV_COMPACT_THRESHOLD - Edit/Write calls between suggestions (default: 50)

Best Practices

Compact after planning - Once plan is finalized, compact to start fresh
Compact after debugging - Clear error-resolution context before continuing
Don't compact mid-implementation - Preserve context for related changes
The hook tells you when, you decide if

Phase	Compact After	Why
Exploration	Reading 10+ files	Research context no longer needed
Planning	Plan finalized	Implementation needs fresh context
Debugging	Bug fixed	Error traces no longer needed
Feature complete	Tests pass	Ready for next feature

smart-context skill - For context that persists across compaction
project-map skill - The map survives compaction at .claude/idev/project-map/project.map.md

What ships with it: 2 files

4.7 KB alongside SKILL.md, 2 of them executable

suggest-compact.ps1runs2.5 KB
suggest-compact.shruns2.2 KB

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most roadmap strategy skills give in 861 tokens

Counted across 614 of the 719 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-09-06

Check for product marketing context firstin 39 of 614, across 16 files
Use compact with a custom summaryin 32 of 614, across 16 files
Compact after planningin 30 of 614, across 16 files
Do not compact mid-implementationin 30 of 614, across 17 files
Structure launch marketing across three channel typesin 21 of 614, across 5 files
Read the compaction suggestionin 20 of 614, across 10 files
Write before compactingin 17 of 614, across 11 files
Write important context to files before compactingin 16 of 614, across 5 files
Recruit early users one-on-onein 16 of 614, across 3 files
Identify 3-5 core content pillarsin 15 of 614, across 9 files
Target a specific keyword or questionin 14 of 614, across 4 files
Stagger announcements to maintain momentumin 14 of 614, across 4 files

Said here and by no other author read

Evaluate if current moment is logical boundary
Remind user that durable state survives compaction

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.