# context-budget > A Claude Code skill from Affaan M's everything-claude-code repo that audits context-window consumption across agents, skills, rules, MCP servers, and CLAUDE.md, classifies each component as always / sometimes / rarely needed, and produces a ranked list of token-savings recommendations — with MCP tool schemas (~500 tokens each) usually the biggest lever. **Use case**: Audit which agents, skills, and MCP tools are eating your context window before adding more **Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/context-budget/ **Topics**: claude-code, skills, context-engineering, cost-management **Trigger phrases**: "what's eating my context window", "how much context overhead from my MCP servers", "audit my Claude Code setup for bloat" **Source**: [Affaan M](https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code/tree/main/skills/context-budget) **License**: MIT --- ## What it does `context-budget` is the audit skill in [Affaan M's everything-claude-code](https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code) — see [skills/context-budget](https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code/tree/main/skills/context-budget). It runs a four-phase inventory of everything loaded into a session: agents (`agents/*.md`), skills (`skills/*/SKILL.md`), rules (`rules/**/*.md`), MCP servers (`.mcp.json` or active config), and the CLAUDE.md chain (project + user). Each component gets a token estimate via the standard heuristics — prose at `words × 1.3`, code-heavy at `chars / 4`. Phase 2 classifies each component into always-needed (referenced in CLAUDE.md or backing an active command), sometimes-needed (domain-specific, not referenced), or rarely-needed (no command reference, overlap, or no project match). Phase 3 detects six problem patterns: bloated agent descriptions (>30 words in frontmatter — these load into *every* Task tool invocation), heavy agent files (>200 lines), redundant skills, MCP over-subscription (>10 servers or CLI wrappers), and CLAUDE.md bloat. Phase 4 emits a budget report: total estimated overhead, effective available context, a per-component breakdown table, ranked issues, and a top-3-optimizations list with per-action token savings. The verbose flag adds per-file token counts and a per-tool MCP schema breakdown. The biggest lever, by design, is MCP tools: a 30-tool server costs ~15K tokens of schema overhead — more than every skill in the directory combined. CLI-wrapping MCP servers (`gh`, `git`, `npm`, `supabase`, `vercel`) flag automatically since the underlying CLI is already available for free in Bash. ## When to use it - Session performance feels sluggish or output quality is degrading and you don't know why - Recently added multiple skills, agents, or MCP servers and want to know if there's headroom for more - Planning to add a heavy MCP server (Linear, Sentry, datadog) and want a before-snapshot - Auditing `~/.claude/` setup for bloat before sharing with a team - Need to know how many of your 200K context tokens are gone before the first user message When *not* to reach for it: - Compaction strategy mid-session — that's `strategic-compact` - Spend / cost reporting in dollars — that's `cost-tracking` - Choosing which agent to invoke for a task — that's a routing question, not a budget audit ## Install From [affaan-m/everything-claude-code](https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code) at `skills/context-budget/`. Drop the folder into `~/.claude/skills/context-budget/`. The skill backs a `/context-budget` slash command (and a `--verbose` flag for per-file breakdown). It scans your existing `~/.claude/agents/`, `~/.claude/skills/`, `~/.claude/rules/`, `.mcp.json`, and CLAUDE.md chain — nothing to configure beyond the install. ## What a session looks like 1. **Run the audit.** `/context-budget` triggers the four-phase scan. 2. **Inventory phase.** Counts agents (12), skills (28), rules (52), MCP tools (87 across 14 servers), CLAUDE.md files (2). Estimates ~63K tokens of overhead before the first user turn. 3. **Classification phase.** Sorts each component into always / sometimes / rarely. Three agents flagged as "rarely needed" — no command references, no recent invocations. 4. **Issue detection.** Three heavy agents (>200 lines each), 14 MCP servers (three of which wrap `gh`, `git`, `vercel` CLIs already available in Bash), one bloated agent description (52 words — loaded on every Task spawn). 5. **Top-3 optimization output.** Remove the three CLI-replaceable MCP servers → save ~27,500 tokens (47% overhead reduction). Trim the bloated agent description → save ~250 tokens per Task spawn. Lazy-load three rarely-needed skills. 6. **Verbose follow-up if needed.** `/context-budget --verbose` shows per-file token counts, the worst MCP tools by schema size, and overlapping rule lines. The discipline that makes it work: MCP cost is invisible. A user installs five MCP servers, each adds ~15K tokens of schemas, and the user only feels it as "model seems slower." The audit makes the invisible cost concrete enough to act on. ## Receipts _TODO — to be filled in from a real session. Once the skill has been run against a real ~/.claude/ setup, this section will capture: the actual context-overhead total surfaced by the audit vs. the operator's prior estimate, which MCP server turned out to be the single biggest line item (almost always a CLI-wrapping one), which agent description was most bloated, the top-3 optimization savings totaled in tokens, and whether the verbose flag exposed any rule-file content overlap that wasn't obvious from the high-level scan._ ## Source and attribution From [Affaan M's everything-claude-code](https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code/tree/main/skills/context-budget) — an MIT-licensed skill collection covering harness construction, agent ops, video, payments, and platform-specific patterns. License: MIT. Quoting the MCP-lever rule verbatim: *"MCP is the biggest lever: each tool schema costs ~500 tokens; a 30-tool server costs more than all your skills combined."* That ratio is what makes audits worth running — skills feel expensive subjectively, but MCP servers are an order of magnitude heavier and almost invisible without an audit.