skills/skills/kvb-skill-essence/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
kvb-skill-essence	Compact skills and memory after a health pass for dead weight. Trigger when skills or MEMORY.md grow too long or duplicate.

Shorter, not thinner. Every fact that still earns its place survives; what goes is repetition, narration, and entries nothing loads any more.

What costs context

Compact by how often a thing loads, not by its size:

1. MEMORY.md and every skill's description load into every session: a wasted line is paid on every turn. Highest leverage by far.
2. Skill bodies load when the skill fires: paid only on use.
3. Memory files load on recall.

A 200-line body firing twice a month costs less than four bloated MEMORY.md pointers. Rank the work accordingly and say so in the report.

Step 1: ask for the scope

Never assume the target. One AskUserQuestion, multiSelect: true:

• Skills repository: the portable skills/*/SKILL.md set.
• This project: its .claude/skills and .agents/skills, its memory directory and MEMORY.md.
• Home: ~/.claude and ~/.agents (skills, rules, commands, agents).

Take nothing outside what was ticked. Read memory.md next to this file when the scope holds a memory directory or MEMORY.md.

Step 2: doctor

Before compacting, find what is broken or dead, each finding with its path:

• The same rule in two or more skills: one is authoritative, the rest drift.
• A first-party skill shadowing a locked or vendored one.
• Frontmatter missing name or description, or a description saying what the skill does but never when it fires: it costs context every session and never triggers.

Dead entries are deleted, not compacted. Fix or report the broken ones; never compact around a stale citation, or the error survives denser.

Step 3: compact

Cut:

• What the repository already records: code structure, git history, CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md.
• A rule the agent follows anyway.
• The second and third statement of a rule; keep the authoritative one and point at it.
• Narration, hedging, and worked examples beyond the one carrying the point.
• A deterministic step-by-step procedure: hand it to the kvb-skill-compile skill, which replaces it with a script call.

Keep any fact with no other home (it is not redundancy) and the trigger wording of a description: tighten it, never drop the "when". Dates stay absolute; never introduce "recently" while shortening.

Step 4: confirm, then write

Write in place: an essence beside the original saves nothing, the original still loads. A git repository needs a clean status for the rewritten paths, so git alone reverts every edit; not clean: report and stop. ~/.claude and ~/.agents are usually not under git: copy each file to <file>.pre-essence first.

Present per file the lines and characters saved and what was cut, never the diff; ask one confirmation for the batch; write only after it.

Step 5: verify

• Re-run the target's own validation if it has one (in a skills repository its test suite: frontmatter, lock, shadowing), admitted under the kvb-org-organize Capacity rules.
• Re-read each rewritten file: every kept fact is still stated, not merely implied.
• Report the before and after loaded-context figure for the always-loaded surface (MEMORY.md plus all descriptions) apart from the rest: that number is the point of the run.

Rules

• Deleting is the goal; rewriting shorter the fallback.
• A skill that never fired is a deletion candidate, not a compaction one: say so and let the operator decide.
• caveman-compress is no rival: it rewrites one named file's wording; this removes what should not be there. Run this first: compressing a dead entry is pure waste.