12,704 tokens. That is what my setup costs before I type anything, and I only went looking because I kept running out of context on long sessions. The scaffold writes 395 to 461 files into a project. 9 to 12 of them ever enter the prompt, so I measured only what is actually resident: Next.js project 12,704 tokens 6.4% of a 200k window WordPress project 12,738 6.4% Express + Next.js 13,158 6.6% Go + Fiber + FastAPI + React Native 13,972 7.0% The spread across every project shape is 12.7k to 14.0k, because 9,266 of those tokens are stack-agnostic rules everyone gets and the per-stack overlays are only 199 to 1,171 each. Skills, slash commands, hooks and MCP tool schemas are not in that number. They load on demand. What moved it was loading by glob rather than by catalogue. A generated table maps file patterns to skills, and a skill enters context only when I am about to write a file it governs. Editing a React component pulls the React skill and nothing else. Before that I had every skill sitting in a folder the agent could see, and it read whatever it felt like. If you want your own number: cat every file your agent always loads (CLAUDE.md, every always-on rule) and divide characters by about 3.7. Rough, but it takes a minute. What’s yours? I have only my own measurements and I would like a second data point. submitted by /u/coding-os
Originally posted by u/coding-os on r/ClaudeCode