context-budget
Audits Claude Code context window consumption across agents, skills, MCP servers, and rules. Identifies bloat, redundant components, and produces prioritized token-savings recommendations. Use when the context window is filling up too fast and the agents, skills, MCP servers, or rules consuming it n
By affaan-m · 3,021 installs
npx skills add affaan-m/ecc --skill context-budget
Source repository · Upstream listing
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
Sometimes needed Domain specific (e.g. language patterns), not referenced in CLAUDE.md Consider on demand activation
Rarely needed No command reference, overlapping content, or no obvious project match Remove or lazy load
Phase 3: Detect Issues
Identify the following problem patterns:
Bloated agent descriptions — description 30 words in frontmatter loads into every Task tool invocation
Heavy agents — files 200 lines inflate Task tool context on every spawn
Redundant components — skills that duplicate agent logic, rules that duplicate CLAUDE.md
MCP over subscription — 10 servers, or servers wrapping CLI tools available for free
CLAUDE.md bloat — verbose explanations, outdated sections, instructions that should be rules
Phase 4: Report
Produce the context budget report:
In verbose mode, additionally output per file token counts, line by line breakdown of the heaviest files, specific redundant lines between overlapping components, and MCP tool list with per tool schema size estimates.
Examples
Basic audit
Verbose mode
Pre expansion check
Best Practices
Token estimation : use words × 1.3 for prose, chars / 4 for code heavy files
MCP is the biggest lever : each tool schema costs ~500 tokens; a 30 tool server costs more than all your skills combined
Agent descriptions are loaded always : even if the agent is never invoked, its description field is present in every Task tool context
Verbose mode for debugging : use when you need to pinpoint the exact files driving overhead, not for regular audits
Audit after changes : run after adding any agent, skill, or MCP server to catch creep early