Context Hygiene: Nap, Reskill, and Compact

Try this to compact your team’s memory:

Team, take a nap

Try this to refresh agent skills:

Team, reskill

Try this to do both and report results:

Team, reskill, take a nap, and let me know how much context you cleared out collectively for future iterations

Over multiple sessions, Squad’s .squad/ files grow — agent histories, decisions, skill files. Context hygiene commands let you actively manage that growth so agents stay fast and focused.

Nap

What it does: Summarizes accumulated work into smaller, more efficient memory files. This is the same as running /compact in the CLI or squad nap from the command line.

When you tell the team to “take a nap,” each agent:

1. Reviews its history.md and other state files
2. Compresses older entries into concise summaries
3. Archives verbose detail while preserving key decisions and learnings
4. Reports how much context was reclaimed

Nap ≠ Shutting Down

This is the most common misconception:

Shutting down Squad every night does not perform context hygiene. You must explicitly tell the team to take a nap.

CLI equivalents

squad nap              # Standard context hygiene
squad nap --deep       # Thorough cleanup with recursive descent
squad nap --dry-run    # Preview what would be cleaned up

In the interactive shell, use /compact for the same effect.

Reskill

What it does: Tells agents to re-examine their skills, validate them against the current codebase, and potentially discover new patterns.

When you tell the team to “reskill,” agents:

1. Review existing skill files in .copilot/skills/
2. Validate that documented patterns still apply
3. Look for new reusable patterns from recent work
4. Update skill confidence levels based on current evidence

Availability

Note: As of now, reskill requires running Squad from source (via symlink). It is not yet available through squad upgrade. This will change in a future release.

Combined Commands

You can trigger nap and reskill together in a single prompt:

Team, reskill, take a nap, and let me know how much context you cleared out collectively for future iterations

This runs both behaviors and gives you a report on how much context was reduced — useful for understanding how lean your team’s working memory is before the next session.

When to Use These

Tips

• Nap regularly. A few sessions of heavy work can bloat history files. Napping keeps context budgets in check.
• Don’t rely on shutdown. Closing the CLI preserves files as-is — it does not compact anything.
• Reskill after refactors. If you’ve restructured the codebase, agent skills may reference outdated patterns.
• Check the dry run first. Use squad nap --dry-run to preview cleanup actions before committing to them.

Sample Prompts

team, take a nap

Compacts and summarizes all agent memory files, reclaiming context space.

team, reskill

Agents re-examine and validate their skills against the current codebase.

team, reskill, take a nap, and let me know how much context you cleared out collectively for future iterations

Combines both behaviors and reports back on total context reduction.

squad nap --dry-run

Previews what a nap would clean up without making any changes.