Brought to you by Jellypod AI, here is a quick question for anyone building with AI
assistants.
Have you ever noticed your terminal session slowing down to a absolute crawl,
and you cannot figure out why?
Oh man, all the time.
You think you are just having a quick chat with your code base,
and suddenly every single turn takes ten seconds to respond.
mate, I, I, I literally had this happen last week.
I was working on a project with eight custom workspace skills loaded up.
Nothing crazy, right?
Just some helper scripts.
But I noticed this weird lag.
Turns out, those eight custom skills were silently burning fifteen thousand context
tokens on every single turn before I even typed a word!
Fifteen thousand tokens?
Just sitting there in the background prompt before you even ask it to do anything?
Every.
Single.
Turn.
It was like driving a ute with the handbrake pulled halfway up.
You are paying for all that context overhead, and the model is getting bogged down
reading system prompts for tools you might not even touch during that session.
That context inflation is huge.
Because people keep adding marketplace extensions and custom skills,
thinking they only matter when you call them, but the model has to know they exist!
Exactly right.
But look, Anthropic just released Claude Code version 2 point 1 point 261,
and according to their official changelog, they added a new command called skill
doctor, specifically, and I quote, to show which loaded skills go unused and what
they cost in context, so you can prune them.
Wait, so it actually gives you a breakdown of the exact token count per skill?
Yeah!
You literally just type slash skill doctor right in your terminal session.
It inventories every active skill, flags the ones whose definitions have not been
invoked in your current conversation history, and prints out the exact context
footprint for each one.
That is so useful.
So what is the actual workflow then once you run slash skill doctor?
How do you prune things down?
So, step one, you run the command and spot the bloat.
In my case, I had a couple of massive SKILL dot md files that were basically full
documentation dumps.
So step two, if you do not need the skill for that project,
you just disable or remove the bloated SKILL dot md definition.
Or step three, which is my favorite, you tighten up the trigger descriptions in the
frontmatter.
Ah, right, so instead of shoving the entire instruction set into the system prompt
upfront, you keep the description lean so Claude knows when to pull in the heavy
stuff!
Spot on!
Keeps your prompt lean, saves your token budget, and speed snaps right back.
That is a massive win for token optimization.
And speaking of this 2 point 1 point 261 release, there are a few other killer
quality of life upgrades in here too, right?
Oh, absolutely.
They added two new settings in dot claude slash settings dot json called
bashOutputMaxChars and taskOutputMaxChars.
You can bump those all the way up to 128,000 characters.
Oh, thank goodness!
No more truncated test logs right in the middle of a build error!
Right?
It used to dump the tail end to a text file if it overflowed,
but now you can keep up to 128K inline before it offloads to disk.
Huge when you are running big test suites.
What about subagents?
I saw something in the update notes about subagent prompts?
Yeah, they added a flag, append subagent system prompt file.
So if you have a massive prompt for a subagent that is too long to comfortably pass
on the command line, you just load it straight from a file.
Nice.
And didn't they harden some of the safety prompts around bash commands as well?
They did!
They upgraded the dangerous rm safety prompts.
Now it catches stuff like rm rf hidden inside positional parameters or nested inside
double quoted sh c calls.
So if a tool try to execute a dangerous deletion deep inside a subshell script,
Claude Code flags it and asks for confirmation before blowing away your files.
That is really smart.
Between slash skill doctor saving context tokens, larger output buffers,
and tighter safety checks, this 2 point 1 point 261 update is a really solid tune
up.
Too right, mate.
Definitely run slash skill doctor on your workspace today and see what silent token
eaters you have lurking in your prompt!