| name | context-budget |
| description | Use when session feels sluggish, output quality degrading, or after adding many skills/agents. Analyzes context window consumption |
Context Budget
When to Use
- Session performance feels sluggish or output quality is degrading
- Recently added many skills or agents
- Planning to add more components and need to know if there's room
- Context utilization approaching 80%+ for large tasks
Context Budget Rules
- Avoid last 20% of context window for large refactoring and multi-file features
- Lower-sensitivity tasks (single edits, docs, simple fixes) tolerate higher utilization
- 80% utilization is the warning threshold for complex tasks
- 90%+ = stop and compact
Optimization Strategies
1. Strategic Compact
- After completing a milestone, before starting new work
- After exploration, before execution
- Before major context shifts
2. Skill Selection
- Only load skills relevant to current task
- Don't load all skills preemptively
- Prefer specific skills over broad ones
3. Agent Context
- Provide only the context each subagent needs
- Don't pass entire session history to subagents
- Extract relevant sections, not full files
4. Reading Strategy
- Use
limit and offset instead of reading entire files
- Use
grep to find specific patterns before reading
- Use
glob to locate files before reading
Quick Check
If responses are getting shorter, less accurate, or ignoring instructions:
- Check how many files/messages are in context
- Compact at a logical boundary
- Resume with focused context
