SKILL.md was 658 lines against the Anthropic Agent Skills guidance of keeping the body under 500, and the growth sat where it costs most: the Coverage section had accumulated the evidence for every claim plus a per-pass verification history (153 lines / 11.8 KB), and Hand-off had grown two knowledge tables. Both now load on demand, with SKILL.md keeping the decision-level statement and a pointer.
Coverage 153 -> 68 lines new references/coverage-and-limits.md
Hand-off 51 -> 19 lines new references/handoff-boundaries.md
SKILL.md 658 -> 543 lines (404 narrative + 139 index)
index rows 24.0 KB -> ~19 KB descriptions now say when to load, not what is inside
check_budget.py is the substance of this pass. check_repo.py proves consistency, and consistency has a natural counter-pressure: a broken path fails loudly and someone fixes it. Bloat has none -- every pass adds a reference, an index row and a coverage claim, and nothing in the repository notices. The new gate measures narrative lines separately from index lines, because 139 of SKILL.md's lines are the discoverability tax for 86 bundled files and counting them against a prose budget would push the skill to drop files it needs. Conclusions restated beyond the benchmark matrix, the evidence record and the coverage statement are reported as notes.
No measured content changed in this pass: every claim, strength label and negative result is where it was, and the two new references carry the moved text verbatim plus the corrections the benchmark pass produced.
