✨ Muffliato Hookus

"Your hooks talk too much. 81% of the noise is one guy."

Every hook that injects additionalContext charges every prompt. Individually reasonable hooks compound into thousands of tokens of standing overhead — and the noise is rarely even: in one measured repo, a single keyword-matching dispatch hint accounted for ~81% of all injection, much of it false-positive matches (a regex for \bai\b matching every path containing .ai/).

What to scan

• Hook wiring in .claude/settings*.json (which events, which matchers)
• Every hook script that emits additionalContext, systemMessage, or stdout the model sees
• Recent session transcripts, if accessible — the ground truth for what actually got injected

Measurement first

Rank before fixing. Per emitter: fires per session × average bytes per fire = injection share. Transcripts give this directly (grep injected blocks by their headers and measure); without transcripts, instrument each hook to log its output size for a few sessions (→ The Pensieve). Fixing the #4 emitter while #1 stands is wand-waving.

Anti-patterns to find

1. Keyword matchers with false-positive regexes. Word-boundary patterns that match paths, substrings matching unrelated terms. Symptom: the hint names an obviously wrong target.
2. Every-prompt injection of once-per-session facts. Environment info, standing rules, and rosters re-injected on each prompt instead of once at SessionStart.
3. Unconditional emitters. Hooks that always print something — status lines, reminders — with no relevance gate. Silence must be an output.
4. Over-broad event matchers. A PostToolUse hook on * doing work only meaningful for Write|Edit.
5. Full-payload dumps. Hooks injecting whole file lists, logs, or reports where a count and a path would do; oversized payloads that should spill to a file with a one-line pointer.
6. Advisory duplication. Two hooks reporting the same condition from different angles — double the tokens, and the twin re-raises what the first already reported (→ also feeds Finite Recursum spirals).

Fix prescriptions

Bounds

• Scope: hook wiring in settings files, hook scripts that emit context the model reads, and session transcripts if they are accessible. Not application source, not another plugin's hooks.
• Cap: rank every emitter (the table is the deliverable); cap prescriptions at 15, largest injection share first.
• Done when the emitter table is ranked once. Fixing the top emitters is worth more than enumerating the tail.
• Quote once, at read time; mark anything you cannot re-confirm UNVERIFIED rather than re-reading to check yourself.
• See skills/opus-pocus/references/casting-safety.md for the full rules.

Report format

The ranked emitter table (emitter · fires/session · bytes/fire · share %), the false-positive census for matchers (sampled prompts, hit rate, wrong-hit rate), and per-emitter prescriptions. Lead with the headline: total injection per prompt now vs projected after fixes. SCANNED NOTHING if the repo has no hooks.