Sessions and cost

How full a session is gets measured, not estimated — the real token count, read every turn, the same figure /context reports. One warning at 75%, one more at 90%, and neither interrupts your turn.

The standing cost is published, not hidden. The discipline plus every agent and skill description load into each session: 29,551 bytes, measured by smoke-test.sh. A real claude -p turn in which 21,804 bytes of the same material cost 9,198 tokens gives the ratio; at that ratio this is about 12.5k tokens. The byte figure is what the suite gates. Each skill you add is a permanent ~100-token tax on every session, so a byte budget per component is enforced as a gate. Raising it takes an explicit edit to the test.

Why not install fewer components? Because it buys almost nothing. Every agent and skill description together is 15,810 bytes, about 6.7k tokens at the same ratio; leaving out the four UI skills and the frontend agent saves 1,558 of those bytes — roughly 660 tokens. That is worth controlling per component, which the byte budget does, rather than per project.