multi-phase-skill-disk-reading-strategylisted

# Multi-Phase Skill: Disk-Reading Strategy for Late-Pipeline Subagents > **Sister skill:** [`multi-agent-skill-silent-phase-compression`](../multi-agent-skill-silent-phase-compression/SKILL.md) covers the **output-direction** symmetric problem (subagent outputs flooding back into orchestrator → silent compression of mandatory phases). Same fix family (file-based state passing), opposite direction. If a multi-agent skill is failing, read both — the bug is usually one or the other (sometimes both). ## Problem In Claude Code skills with many phases (10+), late-pipeline subagents silently fail to execute when the orchestrator's context window is near capacity. The orchestrator tries to inject large amounts of structured data (earlier phase outputs) into the subagent's prompt, but context exhaustion causes the launch to either fail silently or produce a degraded prompt that the subagent can't follow properly. Symptoms: - Earlier phases complete successfully but the final phase's output is missing - No error reported — the orchestrator skips to the completion message - When the user manually asks for the missing output, the orchestrator produces a generic version from memory rather than following the spec - The failure is intermittent: works on short inputs, fails on long ones ## Context / Trigger Conditions - A Claude Code skill runs 10+ sequential phases with subagents - A late phase (e.g., Phase 15 of 16) needs data from earlier phases - The orchestrator currently INJECT