token-budget

token-budget is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from paruff/uFawkesAI. It costs 35 tokens per session (832 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for tracking how much context and token usage an agent session consumes.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps audit session cost, estimate work size, reduce unnecessary context, and choose a model for a task.
Why use it?
It helps prevent sessions from using more context or billing budget than intended.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents); mentions AGENTS.md.

Good fit It helps audit session cost, estimate work size, reduce unnecessary context, and choose a model for a task.

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

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 token-budget

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paruff/ufawkesai/token-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paruff/ufawkesai/token-budget.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 832 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 $0.00035 $0.00832
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00416
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00166
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00083

Measured 6d ago against content hash 1011b6013952, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

token-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 6d 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.

.agents/skills/token-budget/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: Token Budget

Load trigger: "load token-budget skill" > DORA: Cap 3 (Context Engineering) Token cost: Low (meta: about token cost itself)

Purpose

Audit and manage the token footprint of agent sessions to stay within AGENTS.md §4 budget protocols and avoid runaway Copilot billing.

Token Cost Tiers (approximate — verify with current billing)

Tier Use Context size
Low Routing, quick lookups, preflight < 8K tokens
Medium Feature implementation, docs 8K–20K tokens
High Complex refactors, full file rewrites 20K–32K tokens
Over-budget Multi-file architectural changes > 32K tokens

Note: these are approximate estimates. Actual token counts depend on model, context management, and billing plan. Verify current rates at github.com/features/copilot and anthropic.com/pricing before planning large agent workloads.

Context Footprint Sources (in descending size order)

  1. AGENTS.md (always-on) — target: ≤ 88 lines ≈ ~2K tokens
  2. Loaded skill files — each ≈ 500–800 tokens
  3. Files read from context index — varies by file size
  4. Conversation history — grows each turn
  5. PR diff being reviewed — varies

Audit Protocol

Before a long session, estimate context size:

# Count lines in always-on context
wc -l AGENTS.md .agents/README.md

# Estimate token count (rough: 1 line ≈ 20–25 tokens)
echo "Estimated always-on tokens: $(($(wc -l < AGENTS.md) * 25))"

# Check which skills are loaded in this session
# (manual tracking — list them here)

Cost Control Strategies

Strategy 1 — Keep AGENTS.md lean Every line added to AGENTS.md costs tokens on every agent turn. The 88-line target is a billing control, not just an aesthetic preference. Offload project-specific details to skill files loaded on demand.

Strategy 2 — Scope context files Do not read entire files when only a section is needed. Instruct agents: "Read only the services/ section of AGENTS.md §3" rather than loading the full context index.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 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. 6d ago First seen · 95 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 1011b6013952

Subscribe to this mod's changes

token-budget is a skill published in the GitHub repository paruff/uFawkesAI (2 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 832 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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