token-budget-advisor

token-budget-advisor is a skill for Claude Code from naimkatiman/continuous-improvement. It costs 219 tokens per session (1,471 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow that asks how much detail and response length the user wants before composing an answer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when the user asks for a short, detailed, exhaustive, or token-limited response.
Why use it?
It makes response depth an explicit choice when token use or answer length matters. This helps match the answer to the user’s time and budget.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the continuous-improvement plugin — 27 skills, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when the user asks for a short, detailed, exhaustive, or token-limited response.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor
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 naimkatiman/continuous-improvement --skill token-budget-advisor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install continuous-improvement, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills, 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-budget-advisor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor/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-budget-advisor

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/naimkatiman/continuous-improvement/token-budget-advisor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 219 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,471 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 100
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00219 $0.01471
Opus 5 $0.00110 $0.00736
Sonnet 5 $0.00044 $0.00294
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00147

Measured 9d ago against content hash aecc3ac528fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

token-budget-advisor 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 9d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/continuous-improvement/skills/token-budget-advisor/SKILL.md · 137 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 137 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Token Budget Advisor (TBA)

Intercept the response flow to offer the user a choice about response depth before the agent answers.

When to Use

  • User wants to control how long or detailed a response is
  • User mentions tokens, budget, depth, or response length
  • User says "short version", "tldr", "brief", "al 25%", "exhaustive", etc.
  • Any time the user wants to choose depth/detail level upfront

Do not trigger when: user already set a level this session (maintain it silently), or the answer is trivially one line.

How It Works

Step 1 — Estimate input tokens

Use the repository's canonical context-budget heuristics to estimate the prompt's token count mentally.

Use the same calibration guidance as context-budget:

  • prose: words × 1.3
  • code-heavy or mixed/code blocks: chars / 4

For mixed content, use the dominant content type and keep the estimate heuristic.

Step 2 — Estimate response size by complexity

Classify the prompt, then apply the multiplier range to get the full response window:

Complexity Multiplier range Example prompts
Simple 3× – 8× "What is X?", yes/no, single fact
Medium 8× – 20× "How does X work?"
Medium-High 10× – 25× Code request with context
Complex 15× – 40× Multi-part analysis, comparisons, architecture
Creative 10× – 30× Stories, essays, narrative writing

Response window = input_tokens × mult_min to input_tokens × mult_max (but don’t exceed your model’s configured output-token limit).

Step 3 — Present depth options

Present this block before answering, using the actual estimated numbers:

Analyzing your prompt...

Input: ~[N] tokens  |  Type: [type]  |  Complexity: [level]  |  Language: [lang]

Choose your depth level:

[1] Essential   (25%)  ->  ~[tokens]   Direct answer only, no preamble
[2] Moderate    (50%)  ->  ~[tokens]   Answer + context + 1 example
[3] Detailed    (75%)  ->  ~[tokens]   Full answer with alternatives
[4] Exhaustive (100%)  ->  ~[tokens]   Everything, no limits

Which level? (1-4 or say "25% depth", "50% depth", "75% depth", "100% depth")

Precision: heuristic estimate ~85-90% accuracy (±15%).

Read the full file on GitHub · 137 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. 9d ago First seen · 137 lines · 219 tokens per session scan A aecc3ac528fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

token-budget-advisor is a skill published in the GitHub repository naimkatiman/continuous-improvement (7 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 219 tokens to every session and 1,471 once invoked, about $0.0011 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

pb-new-agent-session

Spawn one worker agent on the agentproto daemon, drive it with a brief and follow-ups to a verified result, then tear it down cleanly. Trigger when delegating a single task - 'spawn an agent', 'delegate this to a worker', 'run an agent to completion', 'drive an agent session'.

agentproto/ts · 68 tokens

pb-supervise-parallel-mission

Run N parallel worker agents on disjoint file/topic ownership and fan their results into one verified deliverable. Trigger when supervising - 'I am the supervisor', 'spawn parallel workers', 'fan-in several agents', 'decompose this mission and delegate'.

agentproto/ts · 58 tokens

ap-cron

Schedule recurring or one-shot jobs on the agentproto daemon — croncreate with command, agent, or prompt-session actions, cronlist to inspect, cronrun to test-fire, crondelete to remove. Trigger when asked for cron jobs, scheduled agent runs, nightly check-ins, one-shot timers, or durable session re-pings.

agentproto/ts · 70 tokens

ap-terminal

Open a real PTY terminal session through agentproto to drive interactive TUIs (vim, htop, an interactive CLI wizard, a nested claude TUI) with live keystrokes and byte-buffered output. Trigger phrases include "open a terminal", "start a PTY session", "type into the interactive prompt", "attach a terminal panel", "send…

agentproto/ts · 83 tokens

ap-wait-durable

Get notified when a spawned agentproto session finishes WITHOUT blocking your own turn — background a CLI wait with a completion notification, or arm a cron re-ping as a durable fallback that survives daemon restarts. Triggers — "notify me when it's done", "wait in the background", "don't block on this", "durable…

agentproto/ts · 80 tokens

pb-boss-checkins

Stay accountable on a long mission by scheduling a cron boss that re-prompts your own session on a fixed local-time schedule. Trigger for durable check-ins - 'cron a status report', 'wake me on a schedule', 're-prompt my session periodically', 'mission check-in boss'.

agentproto/ts · 64 tokens