Context files

Writing and maintaining project context files

• How to Write a Project Context File for AI Coding Agents
• Auditing an Inherited Repo's Context Files
• Reading a Context File Aloud to a Cheap Model
• Teaching an Agent Your Codebase Conventions
• A Contradiction Checklist a Model Can Apply
• A Lean Context File: Which Facts an Agent Needs Every Time
• Costing a Context File Review
• Extracting Naming Rules from Commit History with a Script
• All of Context files

Context budgets

Managing context token budgets

• Enumerating What an Agent Sends to a Check
• Token Math for Long Files: Counting a Codebase Before You Load It
• What to Prune When a Context File Outgrows Its Token Budget
• Where a Check's Prompt Grows: Context Drift Across Runs
• Alerts on a Slope, Not a Value: Thresholds for Growing Context
• Caching Token Counts Across Runs: A File Hash Registry
• Cap, Summarize or Drop: A Decision Rule for Each Prompt Segment
• Chunking a Long Context File for a Small Model
• All of Context budgets

Agent retrieval

Retrieval and search for agent context

• A Link Checker for Runbooks and Onboarding Docs
• A Preflight Print for a Retrieval Eval Run: Fields and Thresholds
• Chunking Code for Retrieval: Boundaries That Keep Functions Whole
• Linking Golden Queries to Source IDs That Survive a Re-index
• Retrieval vs a Fixed Context File: When to Swap
• Routing Retrieval Checks: Lexical Test vs Cross-Encoder
• Source IDs That Survive a Document Rewrite
• What to Index for Recurring Judgments

Context versioning

Versioning and auditing context files

• A Review Checklist for Context File Changes
• A Stale Section Detector: Comparing Context Files to Code
• How to Keep a Project Context File Accurate
• A Context File Diff Log: Recording Every Prune and Add
• A Dead Command Detector for Runbooks and Context Files
• A Freeze Test for One Context Section
• A Hash Pinned to the Commit, Not the Branch
• A Segment Counter That Survives a Prompt Template Change
• All of Context versioning

Agent skills

Skills and reusable agent instructions

• Skills vs Context Files: When to Use Each
• A Description File Is Code: Review and Ownership
• How to Keep a Skill Small Enough That the Agent Loads It
• When to Split a Skill into Two: Triggers, Steps and Overlap
• A Registry for Skills: Versioning, Ownership and Rollback
• A Skill for Every Failure: Postmortems into Agent Instructions
• Debugging a Skill That Loads but Does Not Change Behavior
• How to Write a Skill Description That Competes with Other Skills
• All of Agent skills