uic-writinglisted

# Writing the plugin ## Overview The plugin is Markdown an agent acts on. Judge a change by one thing — whether the plugin gets more effective: fewer words for the agent to carry, clearer steps, better results on real projects. ## While writing Anthropic's skill authoring guide (https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/best-practices), applied here. **What goes in** - Only what the model does not already know: an instruction, a definition, a template or an example. - No story of an earlier run, no history of the plugin, no argument for its design, no maxim. - Keep a clause of why where it changes a judgment. - Keep a concrete failure where it shows a rule nobody would guess. - Earlier issues, commits and decisions are not arguments for or against a change; how the plugin behaves now is. **How a line is written** - One instruction to a line, in the imperative: what to do, not how it was arrived at. - Write an exception as its own line, its condition first — *If …, …* — never as a clause inside the rule it limits. **A `SKILL.md`** - Frontmatter, title, `## Overview` in one or two sentences, then the steps in order. - Under 500 lines and 16,000 characters: after compaction Claude Code re-attaches only the first 5,000 tokens of a skill (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills, *Skill content lifecycle*). - The skills one piece of work invokes share 25,000 tokens after compaction, the most recently invoked first, and an older one past the budget i