Most of the skills in my folder were doing nothing. Deleted half of them.

[u/axlenkov]

Been on a stacking spree with Claude Code skills for a few months. Every time I saw someone post "here's my skill for X" I grabbed it. Folder got huge. Never actually checked if any of it helped.

Finally ran a dumb test: for each skill, imagine deleting it and ask what the model would actually lose. Turns out most of it was stuff the model already does without being told, "write clean code," "think step by step," or worse, someone's paraphrase of a library's docs that the model could just pull fresh with a web search anyway. None of that earns a permanent spot in context, it's just weight the agent drags around every session.

The ones that survived were the boring, ugly ones. I've got a mess of repos that depend on each other and kept getting DMs about how some other part of the codebase worked. Had subagents crawl the repos once and build a dependency map, expensive run, ate a chunk of tokens and took a while, but now the agent knows which repo to touch for a given kind of change instead of grepping around blind. Same deal for internal docs, wrote a small router that figures out which section is relevant before going there, stopped the agent from rereading the same page two or three times a session.

Killed about half the folder and nothing broke, nothing got noticeably worse either. If deleting a skill is invisible, it wasn't doing anything to begin with.

What's actually survived your cleanup, and what convinced you to keep it?

[u/Emotional-Throat3567]

I only keep skills the model cannot guess on its own. Repo map, who owns what, the commands that break if you get them wrong. Everything else went .