Expose only `ripwire-router` and progressively load the other skills

[WodenJay]

SKILL is becoming more popular than MCP partly because of its progressive loading, which means there is less prompt added to the context compared with MCP. But a skill's name and description are still added to the context, even though they are much smaller than MCP tool schemas.

I noticed that ripwire has almost 17 skills, and none of them has disable-model-invocation: true. So all of these skills' name and description will be added to the context.

This means that I can start a session, do nothing related to ripwire, and still need to pay for the context of all these skills.

I also noticed that the MCP interface of ripwire is optional, so I guess that reducing unnecessary context cost is already one of the considerations here.

I noticed that ripwire already has a ripwire-router skill. So I am wondering whether it would be better to make it the only skill exposed to the model by default, and let it route the agent to the other skills, which could then be loaded progressively.

For example, its content could be something like:

....

- If you need to find a bug - see `./reference/ripwire-find-bug/SKILL.md`
- If you need to xxx - see `./reference/ripwire-fresh-eyes/SKILL.md`
- ....

I mean, we can use one entrance skill to index and route the agent to the proper skill, instead of exposing all the skills to the model at the beginning of every session.

I think this may better preserve the progressive-loading advantage of skills.

Just a "brainstorming". I hope this will be helpful. Feel free to point out any mistakes if there are any. And I'd be happy to discuss further.

[jmangs]

I've noticed this too; in Codex the skills take up ~18KB of context in every session, and depending on what the model decides to do it sometimes just adds overhead (often it does not need most of the skills being loaded). I've worked around this by building a skill which just has references to the required information and only loads them when needed like described here.

[joyful-ii-V-I]

@jmangs, that is actually the desired intent. The goal is to run ripwire-router first, and then load only the specific skills that are needed. I think Claude works like this, but I still need to verify.

If you want to submit the change for Codex (and hopefully make it standard for Claude, Hermes, OpenCode, OpenClaw, etc.), that would be awesome! The routing and hooks are part of an ongoing iteration and optimization proces

[joyful-ii-V-I]

Related: #225 changes how skills are discovered and installed, which is where router-only exposure would live. #49 was the earlier skills-budget report.

[WodenJay]

I want to PR for this issue, but I noticed that many files, such as .sh in test/, need to be changed.
So this will be quite a huge PR.
I think I'd better leave this to you guys to avoid making mistakes. 👍