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Yardmaster Guide

Manage your agent skills

Skills are instruction files that teach Claude new jobs. See which ones you have, how much they cost every conversation, and fix or remove the broken and unused ones.

Intermediate3 minutes
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A skill is a short instruction file that teaches Claude how to do a particular job, such as following a workflow or using a tool. Claude reads each skill's one-line description in every conversation and opens the full skill only when it fits the task. Skills live in the skills folder inside .claude in your home folder (~/.claude/skills).

See your skills#

  1. In the sidebar, open Agent Tools > Skills.

  2. The Installed tab lists every skill, with when it was last used. Sort it with Least used, Never used or Most used.

  3. Click a skill to read it, see roughly how much text it adds, and Remove it if you no longer need it.

Removing one of your own skills moves its folder to a trash folder, and the message that confirms it has an undo for a few seconds. A skill marked From plugin came with a Claude Code plugin: removing it deletes it for good, with no undo.

At the top of the list, the token total is an estimate of the text all your skills add to every conversation, used or not.

Why did I get a Skill Overhead alert?#

Every installed skill costs a little in every conversation, so Yardmaster puts one amber Skill Overhead row in your Inbox when:

  • Too much always-on text: your skills add more than about 20,000 tokens (an estimate) to every conversation.

  • Too many unused skills: more than 3 skills have not been used in 30 days.

  • A skill is broken: Claude cannot read its header (a broken or missing description, so Claude never sees it), or it points to a file that is not there. The check reads your disk only, with no AI and no cost.

Open the row to see what tripped. Broken skills come first, each with a reason and three buttons: Open skill (to fix it), Keep (stop flagging it for 60 days or for good) and Archive (remove it). Broken skills also carry a red Broken tag in the Skills list.

Change the limits#

Open Settings > Notifications > Skill Overhead. You can change both limits (0 turns a check off), turn off Alert on broken skills, or turn off the alerts entirely with Enable Skill Overhead Alerts.

Alert on broken skillsSettings, Notifications > Skill OverheadAlert when even one installed skill is broken: an unreadable header, no description, or a referenced file that is missing. On by defaultOpen in YardmasterOpens Yardmaster. Don't have it? Download

Skills that come with Yardmaster#

Yardmaster installs a few skills itself, so your agents know how to control Yardmaster, search your past sessions and run code audits. It keeps them up to date when it starts. The Dev Pipeline skill is optional; see Build software step by step with the Dev Pipeline.

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