context-discipline

Manage token budget by adopting MCP-first navigation, lazy loading files, offloading verbose research to subagents, and aggressively summarizing explored details to maintain effective operational context.

Claude Code slows down when the 200k token window fills with raw file contents from directory-wide exploration. Prevent this degradation by using MCP symbol lookup and on-demand loading instead of reading entire files.

The best way to reduce expensive file reads is using MCP-first navigation for symbol lookup, public API inspection, and reference tracing to understand code cheaply before reading only what you must modify or verify.

Keep main context clean by offloading verbose codebase exploration and analysis to subagents for context isolation, then converting explored details into compact summaries and discarding the raw file contents.

Yes, you can estimate token budget costs per phase by planning costs across understand, plan, implement, and verify stages to avoid running out of the 200k window mid-task during iterative implementation.

Apply summarize-and-discard practices when your session feels sluggish or you notice you are re-reading files because earlier details no longer persist, converting explored details into compact summaries to keep instead of raw file contents.