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context-budget

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Use when a long-horizon task is filling the context window and you must decide what to keep, offload, drop, or hand off to a fresh window — when to compact, what the summary must preserve, and whether to isolate a read-heavy subtask in a subagent. NOT dollar spend or caps (that is cost-tracking), NOT finding context via embeddings (that is rag).

skills/context-budget/SKILL.md

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# Context budget

The context window is RAM, not a hard drive. Full ≠ free: a window stuffed to 95% does not just cost more money, it *reasons worse*. Model performance degrades as input tokens grow — even well inside the stated limit, every token added depletes a finite attention budget (Chroma "Context Rot" research, accessed 2026-06-02). Your job on a long task is to keep the *live* window lean and externalise everything else, so the work can run for hours across many fresh windows without losing the thread.

> **The one rule:** if you can reconstruct a thing from a file or from git, it does not belong resident in the window. Keep load-bearing-right-now; evict the rest. The cost of forgetting is one re-read; the cost of hoarding is silent quality rot on every turn that follows.

Neighbours, so you don't do their job here: pricing tokens, spend ledgers and hard `$` caps are `../cost-tracking/SKILL.md` — same words ("token budget"), different unit, dollars vs. attention. Finding the *right* context via embeddings/chunking is `../rag/SKILL.md`; RAG is *how you find* context, this is *how much* you let live and *when to evict*. Prompt text, few-shot and output format are `../prompt-engineering/SKILL.md`; the agent loop, tool schemas and provider adapters are `../building-agents/SKILL.md`; partition-then-gather fan-out of independent work is `../parallel/SKILL.md` (this skill *uses* subagents as a context-isolation tactic but does not own that discipline); the 01-TOOLS / 02-DOCS control plane is `../harness/SKILL.md`.

## Read the gauge first

Before you do anything, estimate utilisation: live input tokens ÷ the model's window limit. You cannot manage a budget you are not watching.

- **Compact early — around ~60% utilisation, not 80–95%.** Most people only act when quality already broke at 80–95%; by then the rot already happened. Treat 60% as the line where you start reducing, not panicking (practitioner guidance on Claude Code `/compact`, accessed 2026-06-02).
- **Trust the symptoms as an *earlier* trigger than the number.** You can feel rot before the gauge confirms it: