Token budget check

Skill Vix0007/vixero-skills/skills/token-budget-check

Pre-flight check a prompt, message, or instruction for token cost and waste before it is sent. Use when the user asks to check, estimate, pre-flight, size-up, or budget a prompt before sending. Returns an estimated token count, a waste breakdown, and a ranked list of cuts with a proposed lean rewrite.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add Vix0007/vixero-skills --skill token-budget-check

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

1 stars1 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.

SKILL.md

2.3 KB, 506 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

token-budget-check

Estimate cost. Flag waste. Propose the leanest version that keeps intent.

Trigger on

"check this prompt before I send"
"how many tokens will this use"
"pre-flight this"
"can you make this cheaper"
User pastes a prompt explicitly asking for budget / size analysis

Scope boundary

skill	scope
token-budget-check	prompts, messages, single instructions
token-audit	SKILL.md files (has frontmatter)
skill-compress	SKILL.md rewrites
lean-response	whole-session response behavior

If input is a SKILL.md (has YAML frontmatter), redirect to token-audit — do not duplicate work.

Process

Estimate tokens. English prose ≈ 4 chars/token, code ≈ 3 chars/token.
Classify input: one-shot instruction / multi-step request / reference-heavy prompt / chat continuation.
Find waste in three categories:

category	flags
restatement	repeats context, re-explains what was just said
padding	"in order to", "at this point in time", "due to the fact that"
over-specification	lists edge cases the model handles by default

Rank cuts by absolute savings.
Produce a lean rewrite.

Output

tokens: {n}
classification: {shape}

waste:
  restatement: {n} tokens
  padding:     {n} tokens
  over-spec:   {n} tokens
  total:       {n} tokens ({pct}%)

top cuts:
1. "{phrase}" → "{short}"  (−{n})
2. ...

lean rewrite:
"""
{rewritten prompt}
"""

before: {n} / after: {n} / saved: {n} ({pct}%)

Hard rules

Never strip concrete constraints (numbers, names, file paths, formats). Strip only waste.
If input < 100 tokens, skip analysis and say "already lean" — the audit itself would cost more than any savings.
Preserve tone markers the user chose deliberately (formal register, specific voice).
If the rewrite would change meaning, keep the original phrase and flag it instead.
Return the lean rewrite in a code block so the user can copy it cleanly.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.