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context-canary

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Install a per-turn canary signal (e.g. starting every reply with the user's name and a turn counter) so silent context degradation becomes visible the moment it happens, and run a recovery protocol when the canary trips. Use when the user mentions a "canary", "context canary", or "canary check", asks to detect context rot / compaction / drift, says "you stopped using my name" or "did you lose context", asks "how degraded is your context", or wants an early-warning system for long agent sessions.

skills/context-canary/SKILL.md

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# Context Canary

A context canary is a trivially checkable standing instruction whose only job is to fail visibly. The classic form: "start every response with my name." The agent costs almost nothing to comply — so when the name disappears, that absence is data. The instruction didn't get harder; the agent's hold on its early-context instructions got weaker. Like the coal-mine canary, it dies first, before the failures you actually care about (forgotten constraints, ignored conventions, re-litigated decisions) start landing in your code.

This works because context degradation is **silent and gradual**. Models don't announce that they've stopped attending to instructions from 80k tokens ago, and compaction summaries quietly drop standing instructions. The canary converts an invisible failure into a binary, per-turn, zero-effort check. The research behind why this happens — context rot, lost-in-the-middle, instruction drift, compaction loss — is in **[references/research.md](references/research.md)**.

## When to use this skill

- Installing a canary at the start of a long or high-stakes session.
- The user notices the canary stopped appearing and asks what happened.
- The agent itself realizes it can no longer find its canary contract in context.
- The user asks how trustworthy the current context still is.

## The canary contract
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