context-budget

context-budget is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jxoesneon/Ciel. It costs 22 tokens per session (539 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

An audit process for measuring how much context agents, skills, rules, and connected tools add to an AI system. Context is the information available to the agent during a task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inventory context sources, classify them as essential or redundant, and recommend ways to reduce overhead.
Why use it?
It helps find unnecessary instructions and tool definitions that consume space and can make the system harder to manage.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the TodoWrite tool.

Good fit Use it to inventory context sources, classify them as essential or redundant, and recommend ways to reduce overhead.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jxoesneon/ciel/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 jxoesneon/Ciel --skill context-budget
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jxoesneon/Ciel

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/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget/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 context-budget

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jxoesneon/ciel/context-budget.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 539 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 $0.00022 $0.00539
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.00269
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00108
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00054

Measured 8d ago against content hash 8eda01c13f24, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, 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 8d 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 · 64 lines

What it actually says

CIEL ADAPTATION: Context Budget (Context Audit)

This skill provides the Orchestrator with a proactive mechanism to monitor and optimize the "Permanent Context" overhead of the system. It identifies bloat in agent definitions, redundant skills, and over-subscribed MCP servers.

Audit Workflow

Phase 1: Resource Inventory

The Orchestrator estimates the token footprint of:

  • Agents: Line counts and description frontmatter.
  • Skills: Total tokens across SKILL.md files.
  • Rules: Global and project-level rule files.
  • MCP Servers: Estimated schema overhead (~500 tokens per tool).
  • Project State: CLAUDE.md and TodoWrite length.

Phase 2: Classification & Triage

Components are sorted into three categories:

  • Essential: Backs an active command or matches project type.
  • On-Demand: Lazy-loadable or domain-specific.
  • Redundant: Overlapping logic or rarely used.

Phase 3: Optimization Recommendations

The Auditor produces a prioritized list of token-saving actions:

  • Agent Thinning: Reducing verbose descriptions.
  • MCP Pruning: Removing servers that wrap simple CLI commands.
  • Rule Consolidation: Merging overlapping language rules.

The 40% Rule

The Orchestrator should aim to keep the "System Overhead" (permanent context) below 40% of the model's total context window to ensure sufficient headroom for conversation and tool results.

Anti-Patterns

  • Invisible Bloat: Keeping 20+ MCP servers active "just in case."
  • Verbose Frontmatter: Agent descriptions that read like long tutorials.
  • Rule Duplication: Repeating global rules in project-specific files.
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. 8d ago First seen · 64 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 8eda01c13f24

Subscribe to this mod's changes

context-budget is a skill published in the GitHub repository jxoesneon/Ciel (1 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 539 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.