meta-context

name

meta-context

description

Design the context strategy for a project or working session — what knowledge to keep, where it lives, what to load when, how to compress it, and how to hand it off — so work stays grounded and compounds across sessions instead of starting cold every time. Use whenever someone wants their setup to remember and reuse context: "set up memory for this project", "what context should the agent have", "stop re-explaining everything", "organize my project knowledge", "design a CLAUDE.md / context file", "session handoff", "context engineering", "meta-context", or "/meta-context". Task-agnostic. Produces a durable substrate plan, a load/compression policy, a persistence & handoff policy, a discoverability index, and a starter substrate scaffold — in plain language. Do NOT use for a one-off question with no project or continuity.

Meta-Context

Every session that starts cold pays the same tax: re-explaining the project, re-deriving the constraints, re-finding what was decided. Context engineering removes that tax by designing what knowledge persists, where it lives, what gets loaded when, and how it's found again. This skill produces that design for any project, plus a starter scaffold you can drop in today.

You operate one level up. You are not doing the project's work; you are building the memory and context system that every future unit of work will draw on.

Operating rules (read first)

• Never ask the user questions. Infer the project's shape, tools, and continuity needs from what they gave you; default sensibly and state assumptions in one line. Proceed.
• Plain language out. Deliver a usable plan and scaffold. Keep the internal typed model (references/internal-model.md) invisible unless the user explicitly asks for the internal work.
• Less, but load-bearing. A small, well-curated context beats a large dump. Optimize for what changes the work, not for completeness.
• Pipeline-friendly. If another skill invokes you, emit just the plan + scaffold.

The four context policies

Full detail in references/policies.md. Every context strategy is these four decisions:

1. Substrate — where durable knowledge lives. Default to a plain, greppable, version-controlled single source-of-truth document — a project brief, a run-of-show, a vendor binder, a staffing-policy doc, or a context file — plus a small knowledge folder, because plain text outlives tools and is readable by anyone and anything.
2. Load policy — what gets pulled in, when. Use progressive disclosure: a small always-loaded core (the project's identity, constraints, conventions) and larger references loaded only when a task needs them. Don't load what you won't use.
3. Compression policy — how knowledge is kept small. Summaries and atoms over raw transcripts; one durable note per decision or learning; prune and merge as it grows.
4. Persistence & handoff — what gets written back. At the end of a unit of work, capture what changed, what was decided, and what's next, so the following session (or agent, or person) resumes warm instead of cold.

Plus the connective tissue:

5. Discoverability index — a single entry point that points to everything else, so future work finds the context automatically without being told it exists.

What to do on invocation

1. Classify the project silently — its continuity needs, the tools in play, and where memory could live. Use references/internal-model.md; do not show it.
2. Decide the four policies — substrate, load, compression, persistence/handoff — each as a concrete choice for this project.
3. Design the discoverability index — the one file that routes future work to the right context.
4. Emit a starter scaffold — a ready-to-use skeleton (e.g. a project context file with the core sections filled in as far as inference allows, plus an empty tagged knowledge-atom template and the index). Make it droppable-in.

Output contract

Deliver, in plain language:

• Context plan — the four policies (substrate · load · compression · persistence/handoff), each a concrete decision for this project.
• Discoverability index — what the entry-point file is and what it points to.
• Starter scaffold — copy-pasteable skeleton files (project context file + atom template + index), pre-filled as far as inference allows, with clearly marked blanks for the rest.
• First move — the one file to create now.

Offer (one line) to show the internal typed model only if asked. Never lead with it.