| name | context-monitor |
| description | Context-engineering hygiene audit — contract bloat, context-utilization discipline, skill misfires, MCP tool sprawl. Use on a weekly/monthly cadence, when sessions feel slow or agents "get dumber over time", or before onboarding new engineers onto the harness. |
| source | Dex Horthy (40-60% utilization discipline); Boris Cherny / AM A1 ("would removing this line cause a mistake?"); oh-my-opencode's defensive-hooks posture (preemptive compaction) |
| am_pattern | A1, A2 |
You are auditing the context layer of this repo's harness — the stuff every session
pays for before any work happens, and the discipline inside sessions. Context rot is
gradual and invisible until agents start missing things they used to catch; this audit
makes it visible.
Audit 1 — standing context (what every session loads)
wc -l AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md CONSTITUTION.md 2>/dev/null
- Contracts: flag
AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md over ~200 lines. Then apply the Cherny
test line by line to the worst offender: would removing this line cause a mistake?
Propose the cut list. Look for lines that graduated (a formatter/hook now enforces
them) — those are pure debt.
- Error ledger: entries older than ~3 months that never recurred are candidates to
prune; recurring entries are candidates to promote into a hook or lint
(
compound-learnings ladder).
- Skills: for each installed skill, when did it last fire usefully? A skill that
misfires (triggers wrong, or triggers and gets ignored) twice gets rewritten or
removed — check descriptions first (that's where triggering lives).
- MCP/tool sprawl: list configured MCP servers and toolsets. Each unused server is
schema baggage and attack surface; propose removals.
Audit 2 — in-session discipline (interview + spot-check)
Ask the engineer (or check recent transcripts if available):
- Utilization — do long tasks stay in the ~40–60% context band, with research
compacted into notes/plans before implementing? Or do sessions run to the wall and
auto-compact mid-task (the failure mode: the agent forgets its own plan)?
- Fresh starts — after 2+ corrections on the same misunderstanding, do they
restart with a sharper prompt, or keep pushing a polluted session?
- Subagent isolation — is bulk file-reading/research pushed into subagents that
return summaries, or does exploration noise share the window with implementation?
- Plan as anchor — for multi-hour work, is there a durable plan/progress artifact
on disk that a fresh session could resume from (the session-continuity pattern)?
Report
One page: standing-context cost (lines loaded per session, before/after the proposed
cuts), the cut/promote/remove lists, and the one in-session habit to fix first. Rank by
leverage — usually the contract cut list pays out immediately, and habit #2 (fresh
starts) is the cheapest behavior change with the biggest quality effect.
