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Your AI Context Window Is a Dumpster Fire – Stop Stuffing It

Every week my .cursorrules file gets fatter. Every week my AI gets dumber.

Sound familiar?

The Stuffing Problem

It started innocent. "Just add one more rule about TypeScript." Then formatting. Then commit messages. Then code style.

Now I have a 2,000-line monster eating 40% of my context window before I even ask a question.

Here's what happens:

  • Token budget shrinks
  • AI forgets earlier instructions
  • Complex tasks fail midway
  • Long conversations become useless

The rules that save time end up costing more.

Why Bigger Rules Don't Scale

CLAUDE.md works great until it doesn't.

Tokens Rule File Remaining Context
200k 500 lines Still healthy
200k 2,000 lines Context pressure
200k 5,000+ lines You're screwed

And here's the kicker. You load everything, always. Your SQL optimization rules load when you're writing CSS. Your API patterns load when you're fixing typos.

That's not smart. That's a dumpster fire.

Progressive Disclosure: The Actual Fix

Agent Skills solve this with progressive disclosure. Load only what's needed, when it's needed.

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md          # Metadata only (tiny)
├── references/       # Loaded on demand
│   ├── api-patterns.md
│   └── sql-rules.md
└── scripts/          # Execute, don't parse
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How it works:

  1. AI reads metadata (10-20 tokens per skill)
  2. Skills get triggered by context
  3. Full content loads on demand

Writing React? React skill loads. Touching SQL? SQL skill loads. No cross-contamination.

The Math

Real numbers from my setup:

Approach Tokens Used Available Context
Big CLAUDE.md ~15,000 185k
12 Skills (metadata) ~300 199.7k
Active skill loaded +2,000 197.7k

80% reduction. Same capabilities. Better focus.

Build Your Own

The skill format is an open standard (agentskills.io). Not locked to any IDE.

AI Skill Builder generates compliant skills from plain English:

"Create a skill for API contract validation. Check required fields, validate response schemas, flag breaking changes."

Three inputs. One skill. Same spec Anthropic released, adopted by Microsoft and VS Code.

Browse existing skills at Antigravity Skills. Drop into .agent/skills/. Done.

Your Turn

How fat is your rule file? What would you split into separate skills?

Written with AI assistance.

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