How to get skills back in Claude Code after the conversation is compacted

When a long conversation is compacted, Claude Code keeps only part of your skills. It re-attaches the first 5,000 tokens of each skill's most recent invocation after the summary, and those re-attached skills share a combined 25,000-token budget filled from the most recent one. If you used many skills in one session, older ones can be dropped entirely.

If Claude can't find a skill after compaction, or seems to have forgotten which skills it has, run /reload-skills. It re-scans skill and command directories and re-sends the full skill list to Claude. The 2.1.299 changelog points to this command as the way to get skills back after compaction.

/reload-skills

If a skill you were using has faded, invoke it again with /skill-name to reload its full content. When writing your own SKILL.md, put the most important instructions at the top (the start survives compaction).