question from the TL:

quick question, do you think consuming more skills in the same session unnecessarily dirties the context?

Say you have a 5 step work, each step with a skill. You can either run all on single session, divide into subagents with relevant skills, or compact or new chat per step.

my intuition says 5 steps in a process is fine. Each successive skill will take a share of attention from previous skills,

so if you have a VERY long complex process where you need skills to STACK (ie instructions from skill 2 must still be honored while skill 6 is executing)

Or if you have many (eg 200) separate skills that all need to be active during a session ( think: agent memory snippets implemented as skills, probably an antipattern in today’s harnesses)

Then you want fresh context, subagents, or to synthetically precombine many skill contents into a single user message (although then you lose the attention recency bias for instructions in step 6 of the process)

Also worth noting that good skills can be a mix of:

- information not in the weights
- steps to execute a process (not in the weights)
-general steering or behavior

They usually contain all three, but what’s in your skills nudges the meta here.

More instructions / process steps? You wanna string those out

Mostly information? Probably safe to combine into one user message.

Behavior? Depends. Adherence can decay over a long session. Fine to split or combine, but if it’s important, you want some way of repeating important rules, either by including rules in all the steps of a process, or by something more deterministic like hooks

And OF COURSE I’m begging you PLEASE stop putting stuff that’s in the weights in your skills. You are wasting time and locking in a specific, potentially suboptimal behavior.