A new Claude Code session in my setup used to arrive with roughly 35K tokens already loaded, before I had asked it to do anything. After one cleanup pass, I got that down to about 13K. These are approximate numbers from my own setup, not a controlled benchmark. The difference was still large enough that it was worth digging into. The point isn’t really to get to 13K. I just wanted to stop paying the context cost for things I wasn’t using. If you want to check your own setup: Start a fresh Claude Code session and run /context all . Mine showed ~35K tokens before doing any work. Look at what’s taking up the starting context: system prompt, system tools, skills, memory files, etc. I went after the biggest things first rather than trying to optimize everything. I kept CLAUDE.md mostly for project-specific information and gotchas, and moved procedures/workflows into skills that could be loaded when needed. I removed skills I wasn’t using. For ones I still wanted to trigger manually, I set them to user-invocable-only , so their descriptions weren’t sitting in Claude’s normal skill listing. MCP servers : I removed the ones I wasn’t using. Current Claude Code defers most MCP tool schemas through Tool Search, so MCPs aren’t necessarily the huge upfront context cost they once could be. I still prefer not to keep servers around unless I’m actually using them. System tools: this was a bigger target in my setup. I disabled rarely used tools that were taking up noticeable context. DesignSync was one of the worst offenders for me. I also turned off Artifacts and Dynamic Workflows because they were costing context and I barely used them. Open another fresh session and run /context all again. Mine was about 13K after the cleanup. Obviously the exact number will depend on your setup. The useful part for me was just making the default context smaller and loading things only when I actually need them. I wrote up the full cleanup here: https://lorenzogermini.substack.com/p/drop-the-bloat I also made a free/open-source companion skill that walks through the audit and helps identify what can be removed or moved out of always-loaded context: https://github.com/Blaise-g/germinai-skills Disclosure: I wrote the field note and built the companion skill. Curious what /context all looks like for other people. What’s eating the most context in a fresh session for you: system tools, skills, memory files, or something else? submitted by /u/LorenzoSith
Originally posted by u/LorenzoSith on r/ClaudeCode