context-budget

A guide for limiting how much project information an agent reads before working. It points the agent to project indexes, relevant rules, and targeted files instead of the whole repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting tasks, gathering background, choosing files to inspect, or checking earlier errors and sessions in a project.
Why use it?
It reduces wasted context and helps the agent avoid spending its available reading space on files that do not affect the task.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oreum-ai/smartstack/context-budget
Any agent
npx skills add oreum-ai/smartstack --skill context-budget
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oreum-ai/smartstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 453 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00000 $0.00453
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00227
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00091
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00045

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7c0a4b5ffabc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 2d 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.

ai-rules/skills/context-budget/SKILL.md · 33 lines

What it actually says

Skill: Context Budget

When to use

At the start of any task, and whenever you're about to read files to gather context. Keeps you from burning tokens by scanning the whole repo when a targeted read would do.

The principle

Context is a budget. Spend it on the few files that matter for the task, not on re-reading everything every session. SmartStack exists so you can load summaries instead of raw code.

Procedure

  1. Start from the index, not the filesystem. Read ai-rules/context/file-map.md to locate things instead of recursive directory listing. Read ai-rules/context/project.md for what the project is and its current state. These answer most "where/what" questions.
  2. Load only the rule(s) for the domain you're touching. UI task → rules/frontend.md. DB task → rules/database.md. Don't load all rules for a one-line change.
  3. Use memory by index. For "did we hit this before?", read memory/errors/INDEX.md and jump to the matching entry — don't read every past error. Same for memory/sessions/INDEX.md.
  4. Open source files just-in-time. Read a file right before editing it, and read the specific function/section when the file is large (use a line range), not the whole thing.
  5. Prefer the data/API summaries. context/data-model.md and context/api-map.md usually answer schema/endpoint questions without opening the code.
  6. Don't paste large blobs into prompts. Reference the path; let the reader open it if needed.

Rules of thumb

  • One focused task = a handful of files, not the repo.
  • If you've read a summary, don't also read the full thing "to be safe."
  • Keep your working notes short; let the memory files hold detail.
  • If the task is big, split it — smaller scope reads fewer files and produces better output.

Output

When you start a task, briefly state which context files you loaded and why. Makes the budget visible.

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. 2d ago First seen · 33 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 7c0a4b5ffabc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

context-budget is a skill published in the GitHub repository oreum-ai/smartstack (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 453 tokens. 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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