token-economy

token-economy is a skill for Claude Code from atuljha23/holocron. It costs 51 tokens per session (1,088 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for controlling the cost of Claude Code sessions while keeping enough context and reasoning for the task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing a model for different task sizes, improving prompt-cache reuse, limiting unnecessary file reading, removing unused MCP servers, and isolating subagents.
Why use it?
It identifies common sources of wasted usage, such as choosing an unnecessarily expensive model, repeatedly loading changing instructions, or sending too much context.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: SessionStart hook event. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the holocron plugin — 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Choosing a model for different task sizes, improving prompt-cache reuse, limiting unnecessary file reading, removing unused MCP servers, and isolating subagents.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add atuljha23/holocron --skill token-economy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/atuljha23/holocron

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install holocron, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for token-economy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for token-economy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/token-economy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,088 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00051 $0.01088
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00544
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00109

Measured 11d ago against content hash 9d553e767ae8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

token-economy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/token-economy/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Token economy

Three things drive cost in Claude Code: context size, cache hit rate, and model choice. Most waste comes from one of these being misconfigured and left alone.

Model tiering — match the model to the task

Task shape Right model
Format fix, rename, small refactor, comment tweak Haiku — ~15× cheaper than Opus, fast enough to feel instant
Routine feature work, bug fix, test writing, reviewing a small diff Sonnet — the default; 5× cheaper than Opus
Architectural decision, cross-file refactor, debugging a subtle bug, reviewing a large diff Opus — use when you need the reasoning, not by default

Claude Code's /fast or model selection lets you pick. Don't use Opus by reflex for a typo fix.

Cache hygiene — the 80% lever nobody talks about

Anthropic caches your prompt prefix for 5 minutes. A stable prefix = the next turn reads from cache at ~10% of input cost. A prefix that changes each turn = full price every time.

What busts cache:

  • Timestamps in CLAUDE.md, in skill content, or in hook output
  • Session IDs / UUIDs interpolated into system prompt
  • Rotating "quotes of the day", random greetings
  • MCP servers that return time-varying schema metadata

What preserves cache:

  • CLAUDE.md that doesn't change day-to-day
  • Skill/rule content that's additive, not mutating
  • Hook additionalContext that's deterministic for a given input
  • Turning off MCP servers you don't need (every schema change invalidates cache)

How to check: /holocron:cost — the cache hit rate line. Below 50% is a signal; above 70% is healthy.

Read discipline — the most common leak

Claude's Read tool pulls whole files by default. A 2000-line file is ~8k tokens. Do that 5 times in a session and you've spent ~40k tokens reading the same file repeatedly.

Pattern:

  1. Grep to find the relevant range (cheap — returns only matching lines)
  2. Read with offset + limit for the range you identified

Holocron's read-budget.js hook nudges this on files > 500 lines, but the discipline has to be yours.

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 94 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 9d553e767ae8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

token-economy is a skill published in the GitHub repository atuljha23/holocron (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 1,088 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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