Skills are good, but have you tried offloading context?
The first time I heard the time offloading context was around September 2025, by a langchain talk that Lance Martin gave, it was one of those concepts that it made immediately a lot of sense.
The problem with skills
What are skills? Skills are basically long prompts that someone created and that are very good at transmitting the information to the AI to do a particular task.
It’s possible that you have had the change of creating you skills, maybe for creating components in your project, or to deploy a specific thing, or to create a changelog for your app…
But skills are long, way too long, does it need to be like that?
I see most skills like 2000+ text code lines, a bunch of information grouped together, maybe once I need the first part, maybe then I need the other, the question that comes to me constantly when working with them is … where did we left building things with a single purpose.
Going further than skills
Imagine a skill that it’s broken down into many small pieces, and for some task a small piece might fit and for another tasks another pieces is better suited. This is what I’ve been doing for the past months, building a kind of Tree of Skills or Context Tree, where just the right information is loaded in the AI for the task at hand.
This is how I do this
/modules
/index.md // Basic descriptions and references to other files/folders in same level
file1.md // File with info
folder1 // Folder with other files
index.md // Basic description of folder 1 and refernece to files and folders
file2.md // File with info
This can grow exponentially, in some cases creating playbooks we’ve created at MAAT up until 60+ files in the same folder, and the AI is able to find the right one thanks to the reference. For the index.md files we use something similar to the llms.txt
Where we point the file name and a brief description of it, this may look like this
file1.md: This file is to do X and Y
folder: This folder contains files that can do Z
This way the AI doesn’t have to read all the file before getting to the interesting part, thus keeping the context thin.
A local MCP to context offload
At the beginning I was doing this context offloading manually, but it was tedious to always have the skill that indicated what is the llms.txt and I found it that I had to repeat it for every single project where I want it, this is what it lead me to finally create gcontext.ai, I am not so sure how to call it, context management system, framework to create context agents or a simple context offloader.
You can read more about it here: https://github.com/bleak-ai/gcontext
Would love to hear any feedback that you might have on this