Aggressive skill/tool pruning saves tokens, but silently deleting a definition leaves the model believing the capability is still there — so it invokes a tool that no longer exists, eats a tool-error round-trip, and re-prefills the whole transcript. Replace each removed block with a tiny [SKILL_PRUNED] tombstone so the model knows the capability exists but is unloaded, and pin skills that must survive mid-task with a deterministic-survival rule.
Leave a [SKILL_PRUNED] Tombstone When You Prune a Skill So the Model Stops Calling a Phantom Tool
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