context-shredding

name	context-shredding
description	Runtime context compression for agents approaching model context limits. Defines 3 compression tiers (full/summarized/minimal) with per-artifact templates. USE FOR: reducing artifact loading size at runtime, context budget management. DO NOT USE FOR: diagnostic context auditing (use context-optimizer), Azure infrastructure.

Context Shredding Skill

Runtime compression system that actively reduces context when agents approach model limits. Agents check approximate context usage before loading artifact files and select the appropriate compression tier.

When to Use

• Before loading a predecessor artifact file (01 through 07)
• When conversation length suggests >60% of model context is used
• When an agent needs to load multiple large artifacts

Compression Tiers

Tier	Context Usage	Strategy
full	< 60%	Load entire artifact — no compression
summarized	60-80%	Load key H2 sections only
minimal	> 80%	Load decision summaries only (< 500 chars)

Action Rules

Before loading any artifact file:

1. Estimate context usage — count approximate conversation tokens
2. Select tier based on the thresholds above
3. Apply compression template from the reference doc below
4. If loading multiple artifacts, compress the older/less-critical ones first

Tier Selection Protocol

1. Estimate current context usage (rough: 1 token ≈ 4 chars)
2. Check model limit (Opus: 200K, GPT-5.3-Codex: 128K)
3. Calculate usage percentage
4. Select tier:
   < 60%  → full (no compression needed)
   60-80% → summarized (key sections only)
   > 80%  → minimal (decision summaries only)
5. Load artifact/skill using the appropriate variant

Skill Loading Tiers

Skills also have compression tiers (digest and minimal variants):

Context Usage	Skill Variant	Path Pattern	Approx Tokens
< 60%	Full	SKILL.md	400-800
60-80%	Digest	SKILL.digest.md	150-320
> 80%	Minimal	SKILL.minimal.md	40-100

Available for: azure-defaults, azure-artifacts, session-resume, golden-principles, context-shredding.

Reference Index

Reference	File	Content
Compression Templates	references/compression-templates.md	Per-artifact H2 sections per tier