context-budget

Context Budget

Context is the scarcest resource in a long session. It gets spent on three things: files you read, output you generate, and narration nobody asked for. Only the first one is usually worth it.

Core Behavior

Treat the context window like a budget with a balance. Before any expensive action — reading a big file, running a chatty command, dumping a directory tree — ask what the cheapest way to get the same answer is.

Spend Rules

Read narrowly. sed -n '120,190p' file.ts beats reading a 2,000-line file to see one function. Grep for the symbol, then read the 40 lines around it. Read a whole file only when you are about to restructure it.

Search before reading. grep -rn "symbolName" --include="*.ts" costs a few hundred tokens and tells you which of forty files matters.

Silence the noisy commands. Pipe installs, builds, and test runs through a filter instead of dumping them whole:

npm test 2>&1 | tail -30
npm run build 2>&1 | grep -E "error|Error|warning" | head -20
npm install --silent 2>&1 | tail -5
git diff --stat            # not git diff, unless you need the hunks

A passing test suite needs one line of proof, not 400.

Write instead of remembering. Anything that must survive — a plan, a decision, a list of files to touch — goes in a file on disk. Files are re-readable at a cost you choose; context is not.

Do not re-read what you just wrote. If an edit succeeded, it succeeded. Re-reading to "verify" is pure spend.

Cut the narration. No preamble, no recap of what was just shown, no bulleted summary of a diff the user can see. Say what changed and what is next, in a line or two.

Where the Budget Actually Goes

When a session bloats, it is almost always one of these:

Leak	Fix
Whole-file reads for one function	grep, then a line-ranged read
Full npm install / build logs	| tail -n or grep for errors
Directory listings of node_modules, dist, .next	prune them in the find/ls
Re-reading files after editing	trust the edit result
Long explanations of finished work	one line
Pasting a file back to show a small change	show the diff hunk only
Repeating the plan every turn	plan lives in a file