cwoodruff/reskill

Context

When the coordinator hears "team, reskill" (or similar: "optimize context", "slim down charters"), trigger a team-wide optimization pass. The goal: reduce per-agent context consumption by extracting shared patterns from charters and histories into reusable skills.

This is a periodic maintenance activity. Run whenever charter/history bloat is suspected.

Process

Step 1: Audit

Read all agent charters and histories. Measure byte sizes. Identify:

• Boilerplate — sections repeated across ≥3 charters with <10% variation (collaboration, model, boundaries template)
• Shared knowledge — domain knowledge duplicated in 2+ charters (incident postmortems, technical patterns)
• Mature learnings — history entries appearing 3+ times across agents that should be promoted to skills

Step 2: Extract

For each identified pattern:

1. Create or update a skill at .squad/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md
2. Follow the skill template format (frontmatter + Context + Patterns + Examples + Anti-Patterns)
3. Set confidence: low (first observation), medium (2+ agents), high (team-wide)

Step 3: Trim

Charters — target ≤1.5KB per agent:

• Remove Collaboration section entirely (spawn prompt + agent-collaboration skill covers it)
• Remove Voice section (tagline blockquote at top of charter already captures it)
• Trim Model section to single line: Preferred: {model}
• Remove "When I'm unsure" boilerplate from Boundaries
• Remove domain knowledge now covered by a skill — add skill reference comment if helpful
• Keep: Identity, What I Own, unique How I Work patterns, Boundaries (domain list only)

Histories — target ≤8KB per agent:

• Apply history-hygiene skill to any history >12KB
• Promote recurring patterns (3+ occurrences across agents) to skills
• Summarize old entries into ## Core Context section
• Remove session-specific metadata (dates, branch names, requester names)

Step 4: Report

Output a savings table:

| Agent | Charter Before | Charter After | History Before | History After | Saved | |-------|---------------|---------------|----------------|---------------|-------|

Include totals and percentage reduction.

Patterns

Minimal Charter Template (target format after reskill)

# {Name} — {Role}

> {Tagline — one sentence capturing voice and philosophy}

## Identity
- **Name:** {Name}
- **Role:** {Role}
- **Expertise:** {comma-separated list}

## What I Own
- {bullet list of owned artifacts/domains}

## How I Work
- {unique patterns and principles — NOT boilerplate}

## Boundaries
**I handle:** {domain list}
**I don't handle:** {explicit exclusions}

## Model
Preferred: {model}

Skill Extraction Threshold

• 1 charter → leave in charter (unique to that agent)
• 2 charters → consider extracting if >500 bytes of overlap
• 3+ charters → always extract to a shared skill

Anti-Patterns

• Don't delete unique per-agent identity or domain-specific knowledge
• Don't create skills for content only one agent uses
• Don't merge unrelated patterns into a single mega-skill
• Don't remove Model preference line (coordinator needs it for model selection)
• Don't touch .squad/decisions.md during reskill
• Don't remove the tagline blockquote — it's the charter's soul in one line