ctx v0.3.0: The Discipline Release¶

When the Ratio of Polish to Features Is 3:1, You Know Something Changed¶

Jose Alekhinne / February 15, 2026

Six days separate v0.2.0 from v0.3.0. Measured by calendar time, it is nothing. Measured by what changed in how the project operates, it is the most significant release yet.

v0.1.0 was the prototype. v0.2.0 was the archaeology release -- making the past accessible. v0.3.0 is the discipline release: the one that turned best practices into enforcement, suggestions into structure, and a collection of commands into a system of skills.

The Migration: Commands to Skills¶

The largest single change was the migration from .claude/commands/*.md to .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md.

This was not a rename. It was a rethinking of how AI agents discover and execute project-specific workflows.

The description field became the single most important line in each skill. In the old system, descriptions were titles. In the new system, they are activation conditions -- the text the platform reads to decide whether to surface a skill for a given prompt.

A description that says "Show context summary" activates too broadly or not at all. A description that says "Show context summary. Use at session start or when unclear about current project state" activates at the right moment.

78 files changed. 1,915 insertions. Not because the skills got bloated -- because they got specific.

The Skill Sweep¶

After the structural migration, every skill was rewritten in a single session. All 21 of them.

The rewrite was guided by a pattern that emerged during the process itself -- a repeatable anatomy that effective skills share regardless of their purpose:

1. Before X-ing: Pre-flight checks that prevent premature execution
2. When to Use: Positive triggers that narrow activation
3. When NOT to Use: Negative triggers that prevent misuse
4. Usage Examples: Invocation patterns the agent can pattern-match
5. Quality Checklist: Verification before claiming completion

The Anatomy of a Skill That Works post covers the details. What matters for the release story is the result: zero skills with quality gates became twenty. Zero skills with negative triggers became twenty. Three skills with examples became twenty.

The Consolidation Sweep¶

The unglamorous work. The kind you only appreciate when you try to change something later and it just works.

This is the work that doesn't get a changelog entry but makes every future commit easier. When a new contributor (human or AI) reads the codebase, they find consistent patterns instead of accumulated drift.

The consolidation was not an afterthought. It was scheduled -- deliberately, with the same priority as features. The 3:1 ratio that emerged during v0.2.0 development became an explicit practice: three feature sessions, one consolidation session.

The E/A/R Framework¶

On February 4^th, we adopted the E/A/R classification as the official standard for evaluating skills:

This came from reviewing approximately 30 external skill files and discovering that most were redundant with Claude's built-in system prompt. Only about 20% had salvageable content, and even those yielded just a few heuristics each.

The E/A/R framework gave us a concrete, testable criterion: a good skill is Expert knowledge minus what Claude already knows. If more than 10% of a skill restates platform defaults, it is creating noise, not signal.

Every skill in v0.3.0 was evaluated against this framework. Several were deleted. The survivors are leaner and more focused.

Backup and Monitoring Infrastructure¶

A tool that manages your project's memory needs ops maturity. v0.3.0 added two pieces of infrastructure that reflect this:

Backup staleness hook: A UserPromptSubmit hook that checks whether the last .context/ backup is more than two days old. If it is, and the SMB mount is available, it reminds the user. No cron job running when nobody is working. No redundant backups when nothing has changed.

Context size checkpoint: A PreToolUse hook that estimates current context window usage and warns when the session is getting heavy. This hooks into the attention budget philosophy -- degradation is expected, but it should be visible.

Both hooks use $CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR instead of hardcoded paths, a migration triggered by a username rename that broke every absolute path in the hook configuration. That migration -- replacing /home/user/... with "$CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR"/.claude/hooks/... -- was one of those changes that seems trivial but prevents an entire category of future failures.

The Numbers¶

That ratio -- 35+ documentation and quality commits to ~15 feature commits -- is the defining characteristic of this release. It is not a failure to ship features. It is the deliberate choice to make the existing features reliable.

What v0.3.0 Means¶

v0.1.0 asked: "Can we give AI persistent memory?"

v0.2.0 asked: "Can we make that memory accessible to humans too?"

v0.3.0 asks a different question: "Can we make the quality self-enforcing?"

The answer is not a feature. It is a practice:

• Skills with quality gates enforce pre-flight checks.
• Negative triggers prevent misuse without human intervention.
• The E/A/R framework ensures skills contain signal, not noise.
• Consolidation sessions are scheduled, not improvised.
• Hook infrastructure makes degradation visible.

Discipline is not the absence of velocity. It is the infrastructure that makes velocity sustainable.

What Comes Next¶

The skill system is now mature enough to support real workflows without constant human correction. The hooks infrastructure is portable and resilient. The consolidation practice is documented and repeatable.

The next chapter is about what you build on top of discipline: multi-agent coordination, deeper integration patterns, and the question of whether context management is a tool concern or an infrastructure concern.

But those are future posts.

This one is about the release that proved polish is not the opposite of progress. It is what turns a prototype into a product.

This post was drafted using /ctx-blog with access to the full git history between v0.2.0 and v0.3.0, decision logs, learning logs, and the session files from the skill rewrite window. The meta continues.