Context budget

Skill Endika/eskills/skills/context-budget

Lean personal Claude Code skills pack — my conventions, task flow, and quality lenses. Requires the superpowers plugin.

Install

npx -y skills add Endika/eskills --skill context-budget

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when context feels heavy or you've added skills, agents, MCP servers, or memory and want a token-consumption audit of the whole setup with a prioritized trim list.

SKILL.md

2.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

context-budget

Overview

Audit what's eating my Claude Code context — skills, MCP servers, the CLAUDE.md chain, and my growing memory — and produce a prioritized list of what to trim. The point is keeping the whole setup lean, not just the pack. This is skill #11, a conscious break of the original 10-cap (since raised again, 11→12, for exploit-hunt), justified by token economy being a recurring concern.

When to use

Context feels heavy / output quality slips, or /context shows a big always-on chunk.
I've added skills, agents, or MCP servers, or MEMORY.md keeps growing.
Before adding more — to know if there's headroom.

The key model: always-on vs on-demand

Always loaded (every turn): skill description lines, MCP tool schemas, the CLAUDE.md chain, and MEMORY.md (the memory index). This is the real budget — trim here first.
On-demand (only when invoked): a skill's SKILL.md body, an agent's prompt. Cheap — a long body costs nothing until it runs, so don't optimize bodies.

How it works

1. Inventory

Skills: make details (or claude plugin details <plugin>) for the pack's projected token cost; note each description length (always-on).
MCP servers: count servers and tools (~500 tokens of schema per tool, always-on). Flag servers with many tools, or that just wrap a CLI I already have (gh, git, supabase).
CLAUDE.md + memory: size of the CLAUDE.md chain and MEMORY.md + memory/*.md. The memory index is always-on, so its growth is a direct context tax.
Agents: description length (loads on every spawn) and body size.

2. Classify each component

Always needed → keep.
Sometimes needed (domain-specific, rarely triggered) → lazy-load / disable until used.
Rarely needed / redundant / overlapping → remove.

3. Detect the usual bloat

Skill/agent description over ~30 words (an always-on tax on every turn).
MCP over-subscription (tools I never call, or CLI-wrapper servers).
MEMORY.md entries that are stale, duplicated, or no longer true → prune them.
CLAUDE.md verbosity that should be a rule or a memory instead.

4. Report

Total always-on overhead, a breakdown by component (skills / MCP / CLAUDE.md / memory / agents), the headroom left, and a prioritized trim list — biggest always-on saving first.

Output

A short report plus the top 3 trims by always-on tokens saved. Act on the always-on items first; on-demand bodies are not the problem.