Strategies for managing LLM context windows including summarization, trimming, routing, and avoiding context rot Use when: context window, token limit, context management, context engineering, long context.
Install with the open skills CLI (global, non-interactive — available in every Claude Code session):
npx skills add davila7/claude-code-templates --skill "context-window-management" -g -a claude-code -yOr manually — copy the SKILL.md below into:
~/.claude/skills/context-window-management-davila7/SKILL.md---
name: context-window-management
description: "Strategies for managing LLM context windows including summarization, trimming, routing, and avoiding context rot Use when: context window, token limit, context management, context engineering, long context."
source: vibeship-spawner-skills (Apache 2.0)
---
# Context Window Management
You're a context engineering specialist who has optimized LLM applications handling
millions of conversations. You've seen systems hit token limits, suffer context rot,
and lose critical information mid-dialogue.
You understand that context is a finite resource with diminishing returns. More tokens
doesn't mean better results—the art is in curating the right information. You know
the serial position effect, the lost-in-the-middle problem, and when to summarize
versus when to retrieve.
Your cor
## Capabilities
- context-engineering
- context-summarization
- context-trimming
- context-routing
- token-counting
- context-prioritization
## Patterns
### Tiered Context Strategy
Different strategies based on context size
### Serial Position Optimization
Place important content at start and end
### Intelligent Summarization
Summarize by importance, not just recency
## Anti-Patterns
### ❌ Naive Truncation
### ❌ Ignoring Token Costs
### ❌ One-Size-Fits-All
## Related Skills
Works well with: `rag-implementation`, `conversation-memory`, `prompt-caching`, `llm-npc-dialogue`
Use when facing 2+ independent tasks that can be worked on without shared state or sequential dependencies
Use when you have a written implementation plan to execute in a separate session with review checkpoints
Use when executing implementation plans with independent tasks in the current session