Agent skill · n8n-io
instance-awareness
Load when the request depends on what is already on this instance rather than on what the user just typed: a short or ambiguous opener ("fix it", "carry on", "what should I look at"), a reference to earlier work in a new conversation, or any question about what has recently run or broken.
What it needs
About 4k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Instance Awareness The conversation is not the only context you have. This instance carries a record of what has been built, changed, run and broken. Most of it is cheap to read, and reading it is usually better than asking. The one rule Ask about intent. Look up state. What the user wants next is theirs to tell you. What already exists here is yours to find out. A question you could have answered by looking costs the user a turn and tells them you are not paying attention — and it is the most common complaint in reviewed conversations: the assistant re-asking for something it had, or restarting work it had already finished. Read in this order — cheapest first Each rung answers a narrower question at a higher cost. Stop at the first one that answers yours. Do not start at the bottom. 0. The block you were already given If an <instance-context> block is in this turn, you already have three things for free: which workflows exist here, what changed recently, and what has run or failed. Read it before your first tool call. It is a set of pointers, not contents. Each change line ends with the resource it is about, and the bracketed number is a stable id. Run lines carry the execution id of the last failure, which is what executions takes. A later turn may bring a shorter block that says it is an addition. Those are extra entries, not a replacement — the earlier ones still stand. 1. activity(action="list") and activity(action="expand", id=N) list looks further back than the block, or filters to one category or one resource. expand opens a single entry in full and returns up to 20 more recent entries for the same resource — which is how you see a workflow's recent change history in a single call. Twenty is a cap, not a total: an older history continues past it, and list with that resourceId reads further back. Use expand when a line is interesting but thin: a save you want the detail of, or a workflow you want the history of. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills n8n-io/instance-awareness