Every session starts with a 200,000 token window. A by-the-book startup used to spend about 70% of it on overhead we control before the first task: giant brain files read wholesale, a 39KB design spec loaded for sessions that never touch design, and a parent folder file still quoting last year's prices. After this pass, the same startup spends about 11%. The rest of the window now belongs to the work.
This page covers three things: how the hive mind already saves tokens, where it was leaking, and what we adopted from three peer recommendations. Every number traces to a measured receipt in the run record.
The 70% and 11% figures count the overhead we control: the instruction stack plus the startup reads. The system prompt and the tool menus add roughly another 23k on top of that, and those are not ours to cut. The bars below show the whole window, so their totals run higher.
Cost framing is context budget and rate-limit headroom, not dollars: we run on subscription. A leaner window means deeper sessions, fewer compactions, and less lost state. Every spawned subagent inherits the standing stack, so each KB cut here is cut from every agent too.
Each bar is the full 200k context window. Red depth shows what standing overhead consumed before any real work. The dark segment is what was left to think in.
Before the fix, roughly 163 thousand tokens of the 200 thousand token window were consumed at session start, dominated by 110 thousand tokens of wholesale brain file reads. After the fix, roughly 45 thousand tokens are consumed and 155 thousand remain free. Of that reduction, 118 thousand tokens came from overhead we control.
The system already ran most of this before today. Every mechanism is the same move, applied at a different layer: defer until needed. The ladder mirrors ponytail's own ladder for code. That skill stays untouched; it is rung six.
The swarm-gate hook scores every prompt and declines multi-agent swarms on most of them (session cap: 3). Main thread first; subagents only for isolated research.
Hundreds of MCP tools sit deferred behind ToolSearch (Search Atlas alone is ~500 tools, listed by name only). 31 skills load frontmatter at startup and full text on demand. As of today the 39KB visual design spec joins them: on demand, behind a 5-line pointer.
One-shot runs write every phase to a run directory, so later phases read files instead of dragging conversation history. Generated indexes answer connectivity questions without grepping. Hook outputs over 10KB persist to disk with a 2KB preview.
brain-search queries the whole memory corpus and returns the top five hits. The startup ritual now uses it instead of reading four archive-sized brain files wholesale. The memory index stays one line per entry.
New today. The subagent default was already pinned to haiku in settings.json, which we only noticed during this pass. The standing rule now routes by task: cheap default for mechanical work, explicit upgrade for judgment work so council-grade analysis never silently rides the cheap model.
Ponytail, active on every response at level full: the laziest solution that works, shortest diff, no speculative scaffolding, output measured in what it deletes. Untouched by this run, exactly as asked.
The startup ritual was written before brain-search existed. It told every session to read the brain files in full. Those files kept growing, and by this week the ritual was reading a 1MB status board, a 265KB pattern file, and a 242KB "read-first signal" that had become a 984-line log. The retrieval layer built to prevent exactly this was sitting one command away.
| Item | Before | After | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| brain/STATUS.md | 984 lines · 242KB | 28 lines | Back to a NOW / NEXT / BLOCKED signal. All 123 dated entries moved unchanged to brain/history/, indexed by brain-search. |
| Startup reads (ritual total) | ~110k tokens | ~5.3k tokens | status-board, lessons, patterns left the wholesale-read list. They are retrieval targets now; the startup hook already injects the last 5 lessons. |
| visual-design.md | 39KB, always loaded | 0.7KB pointer | Full spec moved to docs/reference/, loaded only for visual work. Non-visual sessions stop paying for it. |
| Desktop CLAUDE.md | 573 lines · 16KB | 18 lines | Now a pointer to canonical sources. It was still quoting the old offer stack, which contradicted current pricing in every session. That trap is closed. |
| MEMORY.md (auto-memory index) | 151 lines · 19.4KB | 117 lines · 15.6KB | Status prose compressed to true index lines. Every memory link preserved. |
| Injected stack (all always-loaded files) | 122KB · ~30.3k tokens | 67KB · ~16.7k tokens | 45% lighter, and every spawned agent inherits the lighter version. |
| permissions.deny | 0 rules | 8 rules | node_modules, build output, the 270MB call database, and 520MB of forensic files are now unreadable by rule. Narrow on purpose: .env stays readable because the credential flow wants it. |
The one paragraph that outlives this page (now in CLAUDE.md): standing context is a budget. Anything retrievable on demand must not be always loaded. A new always-loaded file needs a recorded reason in docs/decisions.md, and the quarterly re-audit prunes regrowth.
Verdicts per item: AdoptedAdaptedAlready runningSkipped
The full skill (95 files) is methodically sound: measure, audit in parallel, synthesize, implement with backups, verify. We took six ideas straight into this pass: tiered instruction architecture, cache-friendly ordering (stable content first), the deny-rule warnings, compaction timing at phase boundaries, the session-folder pattern (we already run it as one-shot run dirs), and "optimization entropy," the reason our quarterly re-audit exists.
We did not install it. It ships a 1.6MB measurement script, ~60 Python files, its own SessionStart / PreCompact / SessionEnd hooks, and a keep-warm daemon. This workspace already registers eight hook types, and our standing rule sends every third-party kit through VET.md plus security-radar before it touches config. The audit it automates, we ran by hand in one session, and its audit phases would have missed our actual leak: the brain-file ritual is not part of a stock setup.
Nothing below gets built on spec. Each item has a trigger; until the trigger fires, building it would be the same mistake the leak was: paying standing cost for on-demand value.
| Rung | Candidate | Trigger to build |
|---|---|---|
| 2 · Don't load | Trim SessionStart hook injections (two skills inject full text every session, ~8 to 10KB) | Next hook maintenance pass; needs its own careful review because hooks have blast radius |
| 3 · Don't reread | Lean session resume / semantic caching across projects | /cost anomalies show repeat cold-resume cost, or cross-client work starts re-deriving the same context |
| 5 · Route | Lightweight-model pre-screen before expensive reasoning loops | A recurring agent loop exceeds its workflow budget twice |
| Measure | Per-session token telemetry (beyond baseline + quarterly) | The quarterly audit shows regrowth, or /cost anomalies recur in session logs |
| All | Quarterly re-audit: re-measure every file in the baseline table, prune regrowth, refresh the qmd index | Standing bead, first due 2026-10-24 |