The sort holds one level down too. A skill body grows the same way CLAUDE.md does, and it is billed the moment the task matches, so the same triage applies inside the skill. What worked was keeping doctrine in the skill body and moving every number, threshold and selector into a reference file it points at. An audit of the agent prompts in one repo cut 30-35% with no quality loss, and almost all of it was restating a rule a check script already enforced.