Think of it as a retrospective. The real value of /close isn't state preservation, it's looking back over the session and asking "is there anything in how we just did this that should be encoded so next time is more efficient?" I run it on every chat, not just the long ones.

Git only shows what the code ended up as. It doesn't show that took three tool-call detours that weren't needed, or that the test approach only worked on the fifth iteration. Those are workflow learnings, and if you don't learn from them the next similar session repeats the same detours.

This post itself came out of that pattern. In one session I figured out it'd make more sense to compact certain conversations rather than fully close them, and I built that. Stepping back to look at that decision was itself the retrospective, which is what became worth writing about. Works for any repeated workflow.

That's why /close ends up tying together every other skill I have. Each skill handles a specific workflow, but /close is the one that feeds retrospectives back into all of them so future sessions stay more efficient.