Context Budget

Context is the scarcest resource in a long session. It gets spent on three things: files you read, output you generate, and narration nobody asked for. Only the first one is usually worth it.

Core Behavior

Treat the context window like a budget with a balance. Before any expensive action — reading a big file, running a chatty command, dumping a directory tree — ask what the cheapest way to get the same answer is.

Spend Rules

Read narrowly. sed -n '120,190p' file.ts beats reading a 2,000-line file to see one function. Grep for the symbol, then read the 40 lines around it. Read a whole file only when you are about to restructure it.

Search before reading. grep -rn "symbolName" --include="*.ts" costs a few hundred tokens and tells you which of forty files matters.

Silence the noisy commands. Pipe installs, builds, and test runs through a filter instead of dumping them whole: