After completing work, skills report in a few short lines — what changed,
what was skipped, what to watch — and cut any explanation that outgrows the
change. Explicit exemptions protect every mandated output: decision briefs,
completion-status blocks, user-requested explanations, and report-shaped
skills' report formats (the report IS the work in /qa-only, /plan-*-review,
/retro, /document-generate).
Rationale is signal-to-noise, not tokens: ponytail's own benchmark shows
terse prose alone doesn't cut cost (caveman arm: -20% LOC, +7% tokens), and
independent replications found its 'skipped on purpose' essays ate the code
savings. Includes a good/bad closer example pair per the model-overlay
guidance that a positive example beats a 'don't be verbose' instruction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
