Most people seem to mean "Skills don't pollute the context window [with their entire contents]", they just elide the part in brackets.
There is no magic and people should be more precise when discussing skills.
There is no magic and people should be more precise when discussing skills.
Token count is a less important factor in context pollution than idea count. The worst of the rot factors are when models latch onto irrelevant information, or over-index on some vague idea/suggestion as if it was a hard direction, and then go off course.
The names + one-line descriptions of 10 tools can do as much (or more!) to distract the focus and intentionality of an agent than a 30k token exhaustive API documentation of some tool.