Context audit

Skill ngocsangyem/MeowKit/.claude/skills/context-audit

Read-only audit of `.claude/` structural overhead. Reports prioritized "remove X save Y tokens" recommendations against the model context window. NOT for monetary cost tracking — that's /mk:budget. NOT for transcript size monitoring — long-session continuity defers to Claude Code native compaction. NOT for runtime context decisions (what to read, when to compact) — see mk:context-engineering. Use when planning to add context capacity, diagnosing perceived slowdowns, or auditing health.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add ngocsangyem/MeowKit --skill context-audit

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

2 things to look at

14 stars14 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.
runs commandsInstructs the agent to run 2 commands, including `SCAN_ROOT="${1:-$PWD}"` and 1 more.

SKILL.md

5.8 KB, ~1.1k tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

/mk:context-audit — Context Window Structural Audit

Read-only audit of .claude/ structural overhead. Surfaces what is loaded into every host-runtime session and how much of the context window it consumes, then recommends the highest-leverage trims.

Complementary lens: mewkit inventory --substrate shows the same artifact set grouped by the responsibility each serves (covered / partial / missing), so a trim can be checked against responsibility coverage before removing an artifact. The per-phase read budget that bounds what an audit-driven session should load lives in rules/context-budget-rules.md.

When to Use

Three concrete triggers:

Pre-add capacity check — before adding a new agent, skill, or rule file, confirm the project is below the 25% structural-overhead threshold.
Post-degradation diagnostic — when sessions feel slow, off-topic, or over-compacted, audit to see if structural overhead has grown past 10%.
Periodic health audit — quarterly or on model upgrades, confirm the always-on bundle still pays its keep (paired with the dead-weight audit in harness-rules.md Rule 7).

Context vs Cost (Boundary)

Concern	Mechanism	Unit
Monetary cost	`/mk:budget` + `../autobuild/scripts/budget-tracker.sh`	USD
Window utilization (this skill)	`/mk:context-audit` + `scripts/inventory-context.sh`	tokens / %

The three concerns are deliberately separate. This skill measures only what is statically loaded into every session — the always-on bundle. Conversation history, tool output, and active edits live elsewhere.

Workflow

The slash command runs the pipeline:

SCAN_ROOT="${1:-$PWD}"
bash .claude/skills/context-audit/scripts/inventory-context.sh "$SCAN_ROOT" \
  | bash .claude/skills/context-audit/scripts/estimate-tokens.sh \
  | bash .claude/skills/context-audit/scripts/format-audit-report.sh

Output is markdown, printed to terminal. The skill does NOT write any files.

Steps:

Inventory — inventory-context.sh walks .claude/ and emits raw byte/line counts per category (CLAUDE.md chain, agents, skills, rules, commands, MCP) as JSON.
Estimate — estimate-tokens.sh enriches the inventory with estimated_tokens (chars/4 heuristic, mirrors budget-tracker.cjs) and computes totals including structural_overhead_pct against a 200K window.
Format — format-audit-report.sh emits a 5-section markdown report: header, summary table, top consumers, recommendations, footer.
Banner — the formatter selects a banner based on structural_overhead_pct:
- < 10% → Healthy
- 10–25% → Watch
- ≥ 25% → Action recommended

Output Format

# Context Audit — <scan_root>
*Scanned at <timestamp> · model window 200K tokens · banner: <Healthy|Watch|Action>*

## Summary
| Category | Components | Bytes | Tokens | % of Window |
| ...      | ...        | ...   | ...    | ...          |

## Top Consumers
1. <component> ~<tokens> (<path>)
... (top 10)

## Recommendations
1. <priority finding> — saves ~<tokens>
... (sorted by token impact, descending)

## How to Act
- Cost: see `/mk:budget`
- Runtime trim: see `mk:lazy-agent-loader`

The 10% / 25% thresholds are the canonical source of truth for token-overhead banners — see references/token-cost-model.md. They are NOT linked to MEOWKIT_BUDGET_* env vars (those are USD amounts, not token percentages).

Integration Points

Reuses, does not duplicate: packages/mewkit/src/token-estimator/index.ts is the canonical chars/4 source. Shell scripts inline the same heuristic with a citation comment, avoiding a Node bridge that would require dist/.
Reads, does not write: .meowkit/telemetry/cost-log.json, .claude/, .mcp.json. No file writes anywhere.
No env vars introduced. Window size is hard-coded 200K; override deferred until a real 1M-context use case appears.
Discovery: via keywords: frontmatter and a cross-reference from /mk:budget. There is no separate routing rule.

Gotchas

(none yet — grow from observed failures)

Related Rules

.claude/rules/skill-authoring-rules.md — discovery + Gotchas section requirements
.claude/rules/injection-rules.md Rule 11 — Skill Rule of Two; this skill scores 2 of 3 (untrusted SCAN_ROOT input + filename inventory may surface sensitive paths) so paths are canonicalized via realpath and never executed.