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chore(context): cut 7.6K chars of always-on rules - #245
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…targets The rule was converted to a skill of the same name, but the source deletion only made chezmoi forget the entry; ~/.claude/rules/zero-cost-scaling.md stayed deployed and billed 1,749 always-on chars per turn. The skill body is byte-identical, so nothing is lost. Same gap .chezmoiremove already closes for the superseded writing skills. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every removed line had a home elsewhere in the always-on set or in a deterministically loaded rule: - "Demand Elegance" and "Systematic Bug Fixing" restate the Simplicity ladder and "bug fix = root cause" in development-principles.md; the failing-test-first line lives in the paths:-scoped tdd.md, which fires at the moment code is edited - "Task Management" restated harness defaults (task tracking, plan approval); the one line with no other home (capture corrections in memory) moved to Planning - The model-tier table duplicated the agent frontmatter and the agent list the harness already injects; what the table added that nothing else carries (haiku override, advisor limits, sonnet[1m] billing, the CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL precondition) survives as bullets - Worktree-location rationale compressed to one clause; the constraint and the 114K-token measurement stay verbatim Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The taxonomy explaining why sections are tagged [Harness] or [Guardrail] is guidance for maintaining the rule set, not for acting on it. It now lives in harness-meta.md, which is paths:-scoped to .claude/** and CLAUDE.md, replacing the cross-reference that pointed back at the preamble. Every constraint in harness-engineering.md stays; wording is compressed. 3.1K to 2.0K chars. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
… make The hook enforces the literal patterns; the prose only needs the cases it cannot see (recovering from transient errors, dynamic construction, false positives on diagnostics, how to run one deliberately). Same five constraints, 1.6K to 1.2K chars. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
… rule The line-break section carried two paragraphs of CommonMark and CJK rendering rationale per rule; each is now one clause on the bullet it justifies. The "When to diagram" table stays intact because the writing-bench rubric references it by name. 2.9K to 2.0K chars. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Skeptic review of the diet found two regressions: db-safety.md understated the hook (it normalizes quote/backslash concatenation before matching, per its own header comment), and gh-pr-body.md plus writing/references/technical.md still point at a "Authoring rules" heading in markdown-formatting.md that the compression had folded away. Both restored at a cost of 60 chars. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
Second pass of the context-diet skill, this time on the always-on rules (the first pass, #244, covered skills and agent definitions). Effective always-on cost, after subtracting what the measure script cannot see (
claudeMdExcludes,skillOverrides: off):Rules outweighed skill descriptions 4:1, so descriptions were left alone; the top three would save a few hundred chars for a full verification pass each.
Batches (one commit each, bisectable)
zero-cost-scaling.md.chezmoiremove; the skill body is byte-identicalworkflow.mddevelopment-principles.md, the paths-scopedtdd.md, agent frontmatter, or harness defaults. The 114K-token measurement and every worktree constraint stay verbatimharness-engineering.mdharness-meta.md(paths-scoped to.claude/**). Every constraint survives, rewordeddb-safety.mdmarkdown-formatting.mdtests/writing-bench/rubric.mdreferences it by nameVerification
just testpasses (lint, profile rendering, format, hook and skill-script tests).skepticsubagent tried to refute the claim that every removed instruction is covered elsewhere. It found one factual regression (the hook description understated the quote/backslash normalization it performs) and two cross-references to a folded-away "Authoring rules" heading. Both are fixed in the last commit.chezmoi applyon this machine removed the orphan and deployed the new rules;chezmoi diff ~/.claude/rulesis empty..ai/note and is the regression list if something surfaces later.Deliberately dropped, with no restatement anywhere
The skeptic flagged these five lines from
workflow.mdas lost. Each was cut on purpose because no concrete failure could be named for it, or because the harness already enforces it. Reviewers who want any of them back should say so here.development-principles.md🤖 Generated with Claude Code