Skill verbosity ~15.6k tokens

[marcoabreu]

I'd like to leverage the skill you have in your repo, but it weighs in at around ~15.6k tokens.

Are there any plans to slim down the skill or split it down into a meta- and sub-skills so that agents can load the relevant sections on demand rather than being flooded with a huge amount of tokens; of which most won't be relevant for the task at hand?

This would greatly improve the efficiency of using this skill.

[carlos-vitallink360]

The skill is indeed bloated, PR stacks is not the widest used feature out there and it's not especially complex, paying 15k token tax when you use it is too much, its basically a dump of the --help output in the CLI.

Agents are very capable now and as long as they know you have the extension installed, often read the man page themselves, the skill should let the agent know the extension exists and cover a few common edge cases like conflicts mid stack.

I myself would compact the skill to this (~365 tokens):

---
name: gh-stack
description: >
  Manage stacked branches and pull requests with `gh stack`.
  Use for stacked diffs, dependent PRs, branch chains, or mid-stack edits.
---

# gh-stack

`gh stack` manages ordered branch stacks rooted on trunk (usually `main`).
Each branch maps to one PR based on the branch below it.

```
main (trunk)
 └── auth-layer     → PR #1 (base: main)          ← bottom
  └── api-endpoints → PR #2 (base: auth-layer)
   └── frontend     → PR #3 (base: api-endpoints) ← top
```

`up` moves away from trunk; `down` moves toward it.

## Agent rules (non-interactive)

Every command must avoid prompts/TUIs or it will hang.

1. **Always pass branch names** to `init`, `add`, and `checkout`. No bare invocations.
2. **Always** `gh stack submit --auto` (no `--auto` → title prompts).
3. **Always** `gh stack view --json` (no `--json` → interactive TUI).
4. **Merge with** `gh stack merge --yes`, not `gh pr merge`.
5. **Mid-stack edits:** go to the lower branch (`down` / `checkout` / `bottom`), commit there, then `gh stack rebase --upstack` and navigate back up.

## Minimal workflow

```bash
gh stack init layer-a layer-b layer-c
# commit on each layer with git add / git commit
gh stack submit --auto
gh stack view --json
```

For help on a specific command: `gh stack <command> --help`.