A developer discovered that Anthropic's Claude Code Skills incur token costs even when they are not actively used. The developer measured that five loaded Skills, three of which never triggered, accounted for approximately 18% of their total token usage over a seven-hour session. While the full body of a Skill only loads when invoked, its description and name are loaded into the system context at the start of a session and remain there, contributing to token costs on every turn. AI
IMPACT Developers using Claude Code may need to carefully manage loaded Skills to control token costs.
RANK_REASON User-level discovery about a product feature's cost implications.
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AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →
