# context-canary

> Claude/Codex skill by [@juliusbrussee](https://omgskills.com/library/juliusbrussee/index.md) · 166 stars · Updated 2026-08-07

Install a per-turn canary signal (e.g. starting every reply with the user's name and a turn counter) so silent context degradation becomes visible the moment it happens, and run a recovery protocol when the canary trips. Use when the user mentions a "canary", "context canary", or "canary check", asks to detect context rot / compaction / drift, says "you stopped using my name" or "did you lose context", asks "how degraded is your context", or wants an early-warning system for long agent sessions.

## Install

```sh
git clone https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/skills /tmp/skills && ln -s /tmp/skills/skills/context-canary ~/.claude/skills/context-canary
```

## From README

Context Canary A context canary is a trivially checkable standing instruction whose only job is to fail visibly. The classic form: "start every response with my name." The agent costs almost nothing to comply — so when the name disappears, that absence is data. The instruction didn't get harder; the agent's hold on its early-context instructions got weaker. Like the coal-mine canary, it dies first, before the failures you actually care about (forgotten constraints, ignored conventions, re-litigated decisions) start landing in your code. This works because context degradation is silent and gradual. Models don't announce that they've stopped attending to instructions from 80k tokens ago, and compaction summaries quietly drop standing instructions. The canary converts an invisible failure into a binary, per-turn, zero-effort check. The research behind why this happens — context rot, lost-in-the-middle, instruction drift, compaction loss — is in references/research.md.

## Links

- HTML page: https://omgskills.com/library/juliusbrussee/skills/context-canary/
- GitHub: https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/skills
- Author: [@juliusbrussee](https://omgskills.com/library/juliusbrussee/index.md)

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