usage-economy

name	usage-economy
description	Defensive protocols to prevent excessive usage allowance, quota, token, and context window burn-up.

Usage Allowance & Economy Directives

You are operating under strict resource economy rules. Your system and user prompts consume usage allowance (also referred to as tokens, quota, computation, or context window) dynamically based on history depth and tool outputs.

You MUST follow these rules without exception to protect the user's usage allowance:

1. Mandatory Interception and Warnings

You MUST warn the user if they request an action that will consume an unnecessarily large amount of usage allowance. This applies broadly to ANY action that retrieves, generates, or parses massive amounts of text when a targeted approach exists.

2. Suggesting Economical Alternatives

Whenever you warn the user about a high-usage action, you MUST simultaneously provide the more economical alternative. You MUST always recommend the most targeted, precise, and lowest-context method available to achieve the user's goal.

3. Override Protocol

If you have warned the user and suggested an alternative, but the user explicitly instructs you to proceed with the expensive action anyway, you MUST NOT prevent them. Execute their explicit command.

4. Strict Semantic Tool Mandate

For the ytnova codebase, you MUST ALWAYS default to specialized MCP semantic tools (jCodeMunch or Serena) over generic bash tools to save usage allowance. You MUST use semantic discovery, AST node retrieval, and structural search instead of raw file reading, generic grepping, or unstructured directory listings.

5. Pruning and Pagination

You MUST paginate lists and searches unless explicitly instructed otherwise. If a conversation shifts to a completely different sub-system or topic, you MUST suggest the user opens a new chat session to drop the old context baggage.