aws / aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws
Skill descriptions consume too much context budget per session
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 2.7k
- Forks
- 314
- Avg merge
- 1d 1h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 51
Description
Installing the plugin adds 13 aws-core:* skills to the listing that is injected into every session's context. Even without invoking any skill, the description text for these skills costs ~1,600 tokens per session — roughly 73% of Claude Code's default 1% skill listing budget.
This causes the harness to emit a truncation warning and drop skill descriptions silently:
Skill listing will be truncated
11 descriptions dropped (full descriptions kept for most-used skills)
run /skills to disable some, or raise skillListingBudgetFraction in settings.json
Measured description sizes (chars/4 approximation):
| Skill | ~Tokens |
|---|---|
| aws-core:aws-observability | 219 |
| aws-core:aws-serverless | 210 |
| aws-core:aws-amplify | 208 |
| aws-core:amazon-bedrock | 193 |
| aws-core:aws-containers | 155 |
| aws-core:aws-sdk-python-usage | 133 |
| aws-core:aws-billing-and-cost-management | 123 |
| aws-core:aws-cdk | 104 |
| aws-core:aws-messaging-and-streaming | 78 |
| aws-core:aws-sdk-js-v3-usage | 69 |
| aws-core:aws-cloudformation | 68 |
| aws-core:aws-sdk-swift-usage | 29 |
| aws-core:aws-iam | 17 |
| Total | 1,606 |
The descriptions are long because they double as trigger conditions ("ALSO USE for...", "Use this skill whenever..."), which is understandable — but it means installing this plugin has a persistent per-session cost even when doing nothing AWS-related.
Possible mitigations (in order of preference):
- Trim descriptions — separate the trigger heuristics from the user-facing description; only the short description needs to be in the listing
- Opt-in skills — let users enable only the
aws-core:*skills they actually use, rather than registering all 13 on install - Lazy listing — only surface skills in the listing when the working directory contains AWS-related files (e.g.,
amplify/,cdk.json,template.yaml,*.tf)
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Install the plugin and reproduce the skill-listing truncation warning, then inspect how the 13 aws-core skills and their descriptions are registered. Compare the proposed trimming, opt-in, and lazy-listing approaches with maintainers; done means AWS skill descriptions no longer consume excessive per-session context or trigger silent truncation.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- aws
- Domain
- ai-infra-agents, tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 48/100