Dead Auto-Skills Were Padding Every Conversation: A Weekly Curator That Flags at 30 Days and Archives at 90

Claude Code's abilities improve as you use it, but this comes at a cost. The tool starts adding skills to its memory, which in turn increases the amount of context injected into conversations. As more skills accumulate, the monthly token bill rises while the quality of responses decreases. A university student once struggled with this issue, spending six months building an autonomous Claude Code environment to combat skill rot.

Skills that were once perfect gradually became unused and burdensome, taking up space in every conversation. To solve this problem, a weekly automated curation pass was implemented. This system detects unused skills and either marks them as "stale" or moves them to an archive directory. The process involves taking a snapshot of the skills directory, scanning for skills with the "author: auto" tag, calculating the last used date, and then determining if the skill is stale or should be archived.

With this setup, the environment remains organized and efficient, preventing the degradation of output quality caused by unnecessary context.