context-budget

context-budget is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cveralyon/axel-setup. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,120 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill that measures how much of a Claude Code setup's context is used by agents, skills, commands, hooks, integrations, and instruction files. Context is the information loaded into a session for the assistant to use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a setup has grown, responses have degraded, or you are considering adding more agents, skills, or integrations. It produces prioritized suggestions for saving context.
Why use it?
It helps find oversized or duplicated instructions that leave less room for the actual coding task. It also highlights setup areas where context can be reduced.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it when a setup has grown, responses have degraded, or you are considering adding more agents, skills, or integrations. It produces prioritized suggestions for saving context.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cveralyon/axel-setup/context-budget
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 cveralyon/axel-setup --skill context-budget
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cveralyon/axel-setup

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 context-budget

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cveralyon/axel-setup/context-budget.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cveralyon/axel-setup/context-budget)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cveralyon/axel-setup/context-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cveralyon/axel-setup/context-budget.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,120 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 $0.00055 $0.01120
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00560
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00224
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00112

Measured 7d ago against content hash 991fee71e40a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

context-budget 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 7d 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/context-budget/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context Budget

Estimate the token overhead of everything loaded into a Claude Code session and surface concrete ways to reclaim context space. Adapted from ECC's context-budget for a single-runtime (Claude Code) setup on a large Opus window.

When to Use

  • The setup has grown (many agents, hooks, skills, MCP servers) and you want the real load cost.
  • Output quality degrades, or the context monitor fires earlier than expected.
  • Before adding more agents, skills, or MCP servers: check headroom first.
  • Running the /context-budget command (this skill backs it).

How It Works

Token estimation: prose uses words × 1.3, code or JSON uses chars / 4.

Phase 1 — Inventory

Scan each source and estimate tokens.

  • Agents (~/.claude/agents/*.md): tokens per file. Flag files over 200 lines (heavy) and a description over 30 words (it loads into every Task tool invocation, even for agents never spawned).
  • Skills (~/.claude/skills/*/SKILL.md): tokens per SKILL.md. Flag over 400 lines.
  • Commands (~/.claude/commands/*.md): tokens per file. Flag stale or duplicated entries.
  • Hooks (~/.claude/hooks/ plus the wiring in settings.json): count active hooks. Flag heavy or overlapping ones.
  • MCP servers (active MCP config): count servers and total tools. Estimate ~500 tokens per tool schema. Flag servers over 20 tools, and servers that wrap a CLI already available for free (gh, git, vercel, supabase).
  • CLAUDE.md and memory chain (~/CLAUDE.md, ~/.claude/memory/MEMORY.md, any project CLAUDE.md): tokens per file. Flag a combined total over 400 lines, or a MEMORY index that carries detail instead of one-line pointers.

Note on RTK: it compresses Bash OUTPUT at runtime. It does not reduce the LOAD cost of this setup. Measure the load cost (the files above), not RTK-filtered command output.

Phase 2 — Classify

Bucket Criteria Action
Always needed Referenced in CLAUDE.md, backs an active command, or matches current work Keep
Sometimes needed Domain-specific, not referenced in CLAUDE.md On-demand or lazy-load
Rarely needed No reference, overlapping content, no project match Remove or archive

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. 7d ago First seen · 87 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 991fee71e40a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

context-budget is a skill published in the GitHub repository cveralyon/axel-setup (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,120 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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