Trim Skills, Stop Treating Your Agent Like a Chatbot

An r/hermesagent post pushed back on a habit most agent-power-users develop: hoarding default skills. The OP went from 73 default skills to 26. The framing is clean: every skill the agent scans to decide "do I use this?" costs tokens. Bloat your folder with 70 defaults and that adds up over a few hundred messages a week.

The math behind skill bloat

Each skill description is in every message's input. ~150 tokens per description on average. 70 skills × 150 = ~10,500 input tokens per message just describing tools. At 300 messages/week, that's 3.15M input tokens/week of pure description overhead, irrespective of what the agent actually does.

On Sonnet 4.6 input rates, ~$3/week. On Opus 4.7 input rates, ~$15/week. Per heavy user. The bill compounds over a year into something measurable.

The trim recipe

1. Drop skills not invoked in 2 weeks. Honest log = honest list. If you didn't use it, you don't need it loaded.
2. Drop duplicates. Multiple "fetch URL" or "web search" variants — keep the most reliable one, kill the rest.
3. Drop "cool in theory" skills. Twitter, YouTube scraping, Spotify, etc. unless these match real workflow.
4. Replace 5-8 narrow web/scrape skills with one Scavio MCP. Six tools (search, reddit_search, youtube_search, amazon_search, walmart_search, extract) under one MCP, one description block.
5. Re-measure. Per-message input tokens before vs after. Expect 4-8K input tokens saved per message.

# Audit current MCPs
claude mcp list

# Drop unused
claude mcp remove twitter
claude mcp remove youtube-scraper
claude mcp remove generic-fetch

# Replace narrow web skills with one Scavio MCP
claude mcp add scavio https://mcp.scavio.dev/mcp \
  --header 'x-api-key: $SCAVIO_API_KEY'

Routing accuracy improves on top of cost

With 5 search-flavored skills wired (google_search, web_lookup, find_url, serp_query, generic_fetch), the LLM picks differently per prompt phrasing — a coin flip. Consolidating to one Scavio MCP removes the ambiguity. The agent calls scavio.search for web SERP, scavio.reddit_search for community signal, etc. — distinct affordances, no overlap. Routing accuracy correlates with affordance clarity.

The OP's discipline, generalized

The OP didn't pick 26 because that's the right number. They picked 26 because that's what their honest 2-week log produced after dropping unused. Your number might be 18 or 32. The discipline is the audit, not a magic count.

Quarterly re-audit

Skills creep back. New experiments add new MCPs. Some stick, most don't. Re-audit every quarter same way: drop bottom 20% by usage. The folder stays honest because the audit stays honest.

The replacement that actually wins

The substitution that produces the biggest token delta is replacing narrow web skills with one consolidated search MCP. It's not just the token count — it's the routing improvement compounding into fewer failed tool selections per session, fewer retries, fewer accidental wrong-tool invocations that the user has to undo.

Per-week cost saved

At 300 messages/week and 5K input tokens saved per message: 1.5M input tokens/week saved. On Sonnet 4.6, ~$3-5/week. On Opus 4.7, ~$15/week. Per heavy user. Across a 5-person agent-using team, the annual delta is several thousand dollars and most people never measure it.

Why "agent like chatbot" is the wrong framing

Chatbots get every option presented every turn because that's how chat menus work. Agents don't need every tool described in every message; they need the right tool surfaced when relevant. Trimming the folder pushes the agent closer to the agent shape and away from the chatbot shape. The OP's framing is right: stop treating your agent like a chatbot. It performs better when you don't.