Disabled plugin skills still appear in system prompt (example-skills)
Bug Description
Plugin skills from disabled plugins still appear in the system prompt's skill list, consuming context window tokens even when explicitly disabled in .claude/settings.json.
Steps to Reproduce
- In
.claude/settings.json, set a plugin tofalse:
``json``
"enabledPlugins": {
"example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills": false
}
- Start a new Claude Code session
- Observe the system-reminder skill list
Expected Behavior
Skills from example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills should NOT appear in the system prompt when the plugin is disabled.
Actual Behavior
All ~15 example-skills:* skill descriptions (theme-factory, doc-coauthoring, claude-api, xlsx, pdf, algorithmic-art, internal-comms, skill-creator, canvas-design, pptx, slack-gif-creator, webapp-testing, frontend-design, mcp-builder, brand-guidelines, docx, web-artifacts-builder) appear in the system prompt alongside their enabled counterpart document-skills:*.
This means duplicate skill descriptions (document-skills + example-skills) consume context even though only document-skills is enabled.
Impact
Each skill description is ~50-150 tokens. With ~15 duplicated skills, that's ~750-2,250 unnecessary tokens in every conversation's system prompt. For users with many plugins, this compounds and contributes to a high baseline context usage (35%+ of window consumed before any user interaction).
Environment
- Claude Code CLI (latest)
- macOS Darwin 25.3.0
- Settings file:
.claude/settings.jsonwithenabledPluginsconfiguration
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