Agent skill · pskoett
context-surfing
Monitors context window health during large, long-running, multi-session, or explicitly context-sensitive work. Uses bounded external anchors, one cold-context review when self-recovery is uncertain, and a clean handoff on real drift. Do not auto-activate merely because a medium task has an intent frame and plan.
What it needs
About 12k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Context Surfing Install Fallback using the Agent Skills CLI: The agent rides the wave of peak context. When the wave crests, it commits. When it detects drift, it pulls out cleanly — saving state, handing off, and letting the next session catch the next wave. No wipeouts. No zombie sessions. Only intentional, high-fidelity execution. --- Mental Model Think of context like an ocean wave: Paddling in = loading the intent frame, plan, and initial context. Energy is building. The peak = full context coherence. The agent knows exactly what it's doing and why. This is when to execute. The shoulder = context starting to flatten. Still rideable, but output density is dropping. The close-out = drift. Contradiction, hedging, second-guessing, or hallucinated details. Wipe-out territory. The skill's job: ride as long as the wave is good, exit before it closes out. --- Lifecycle Position Context Surfing is an optional execution layer for work with meaningful context pressure. It wraps execution between intent capture and post-completion review only when the task is Large, Long-running, multi-session, explicitly requests context monitoring, or shows concrete drift risk. Relationship with intent-framed-agent When context-surfing is activated, both skills are live during execution. They monitor different failure modes: intent-framed-agent monitors scope drift — am I doing the right thing? It fires structured Intent Checks when work moves outside the stated outcome. context-surfing monitors context quality drift — am I still capable of doing it well? It fires when the agent's own coherence degrades (hallucination, contradiction, hedging). They are complementary, not redundant. An agent can be perfectly on-scope while its context quality degrades (e.g., it's doing the right thing but starting to hallucinate details). Conversely, scope drift can happen with perfect context quality (the agent deliberately chases a tangent). …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills pskoett/context-surfing--c6e47a