Disabled skills still consume context tokens
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 25, 2026 by jamesalvarez Closed Mar 29, 2026
Description
Skills listed in disabledSkills in settings are prevented from being invoked, but they are still loaded into the context window and consume tokens. Expected behavior: disabled skills should not be included in the context at all.
Steps to reproduce
- Add skills to
disabledSkillsin~/.claude/settings.jsonor.claude/settings.json:
{
"disabledSkills": [
"compound-engineering:andrew-kane-gem-writer",
"compound-engineering:dhh-rails-style",
"compound-engineering:dspy-ruby"
]
}
- Start a conversation and run
/context - Disabled skills still appear in the Skills list and their token counts are included in the total
Expected behavior
Disabled skills should be excluded from the context window entirely, not just prevented from being invoked. The disabledSkills setting should reduce token usage, not just block invocation.
Environment
- Claude Code CLI
- macOS
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