I deleted 24 Claude Code skills and only 9 came back

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I spent half a day cleaning up my Claude Code setup: 24 skills became 9 (removed duplicates and unused) and CLAUDE.md went from 246 lines to 123.

These observations are from Claude Code 2.1.252; behavior may differ in other versions.

The biggest lesson: measure instead of guessing. I expected MCP tools to be expensive. My CLAUDE.md and skill descriptions turned out to be better places to trim.

What I did

  1. Backed up ~/.claude. Especially projects/<slug>/memory/. During an earlier reset, I orphaned my memory files and didn’t notice for a while.cp -R "$HOME/.claude" "$HOME/.claude-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
  2. Ran /context all. It showed tool listings that the headline /context view didn’t expose. I saved the output for comparison.
  3. Disabled unused connectors. In my setup, enabled but unauthenticated connectors still added tool names to context.
  4. I deleted skills, commands, plugins, and settings. I left memory, history, and other runtime data alone.
  5. Added things back only when I needed them. 15 of the 24 never came back. The rest, I moved over from the back-up, as needed. I shortened descriptions and optimized the ones that did.
  6. Trimmed CLAUDE.md. Tool instructions moved into the relevant skills. Always-needed rules stayed. I also reviewed memory, moving occasional reference material into skills and removing stale notes.
  7. Started a fresh session and ran /context all again.

That’s it.

Back it up, measure, remove what you don’t use, and restore things as you actually need them.

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