context-budget

What this skill does

When applied, it prepends a system prompt before your request is sent — no extra calls and no change to how you are billed beyond the added tokens.

---
name: context-budget
description: Audits Claude Code context window consumption across agents, skills, MCP servers, and rules. Identifies bloat, redundant components, and produces prioritized token-savings recommendations.
origin: ECC
---

# Context Budget

Analyze token overhead across every loaded component in a Claude Code session and surface actionable optimizations to reclaim context space.

## When to Use

- Session performance feels sluggish or output quality is degrading
- You've recently added many skills, agents, or MCP servers
- You want to know how much context headroom you actually have
- Planning to add more components and need to know if there's room
- Running `/context-budget` command (this skill backs it)

## How It Works

### Phase 1: Inventory

Scan all component directories and estimate token consumption:

**Agents** (`agents/*.md`)
- Count lines and tokens per file (words × 1.3)
- Extract `description` frontmatter length
- Flag: files >200 lines (heavy), description >30 words (bloated frontmatter)

**Skills** (`skills/*/SKILL.md`)
- Count tokens per SKILL.md
- Flag: files >400 lines
- Check for duplicate copies in `.agents/skills/` — skip identical copies to avoid double-counting

**Rules** (`rules/**/*.md`)
- Count tokens per file
- Flag: files >100 lines
- Detect content overlap between rule files in the same language module

**MCP Servers** (`.mcp.json` or active MCP config)
- Count configured servers and total tool count
- Estimate schema overhead at ~500 tokens per tool
- Flag: servers with >20 tools, servers that wrap simple CLI commands (`gh`, `git`, `npm`, `supabase`, `vercel`)

**CLAUDE.md** (project + user-level)
- Count tokens per file in the CLAUDE.md chain
- Flag: combined total >300 lines

### Phase 2: Classify

Sort every component into a bucket:

| Bucket | Criteria | Action |
|--------|----------|--------|
| **Always needed** | Referenced in CLAUDE.md, backs an active command, or matches current project type | Keep |
| **Som

Use this skill

{
  "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
  "skill": "imp-0987abaa-66b9-4bac-b919-f76dc261f27e",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "…" }]
}

More skills