Every skill you install puts its name and description in front of Claude before every task. Claude Code keeps that list to about 1% of the context window: roughly 8,000 characters at 200K, 40,000 at 1M. Past that, the least used skills lose their descriptions and Claude only sees their names. The skill pack I maintain has 150 skills whose descriptions add up to about 22,900 characters, almost three times that list, and there was no way to see which ones were getting cut. So I built a small local app (one node command, opens a window) that shows a repo’s skills as books: The spine’s width is the characters that skill costs on the list. One shelf is 8,000 characters, with a bookend where Claude Code stops. At 1M the shelf gets five times longer and you scroll along it. Your personal skills in ~/.claude/skills stand on the same shelf, since they fill the same list in every project. Each skill has one control: Automatically, When I ask, or Off. “When I ask” writes disable-model-invocation: true so it only runs as /name and costs nothing on the list. Off moves the folder to .agents/shelf , which no agent reads; On moves it back. You can edit a SKILL.md in place, or have Claude Code rewrite it for your repo. That’s a read-only claude -p run that returns the whole file; you read it before saving. It finds SKILL.md folders in the repo that no agent reads (a skills/ folder outside .claude/skills ) and links them in without moving them. How Claude Code helped: I built most of it with Claude Code. It’s a zero-dependency Node server and a React window. A few things I learned about Claude Code while building it: - It only reads .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md , one level deep. Nested category folders and .agents/skills are invisible to it unless you add a link. - An unquoted : inside a description makes the YAML invalid, and the skill silently disappears. The app flags those and quotes them in one click. - Since 2.1.277 Claude Code reads AGENTS.md when there’s no CLAUDE.md, and the Project instructions setting in /config can make it read both. The app is free in the sample download (with 6 skills): https://www.rival.tips/workshop . The paid version adds 150 skills. Happy to answer anything about how the listing budget works. submitted by /u/sirjoaco
Originally posted by u/sirjoaco on r/ClaudeCode