irisandClaude Opus 5
620a7d0a83
Measured: an app-spawned session starts at ~33,200 tokens of context, of which ~20,000 is written fresh on every spawn -- the always-loaded rule files and this file -- and only ~13,200 comes from a shared cache. That 20,000 is billed at 1.25x on every single session start. This file drops to 19,882 bytes from 21,293. What went is narrative that PLAN.md already carries in more detail (the phase history, the submodule drift story) and the parts of "Where things run" that MACHINE.md states once for every project. What stayed is every operational fact: the commands, the llama.cpp and ssh test recipes, the import rules, and everything under "Things that have bitten". The global chain was trimmed in the same pass, 43,039 -> 34,069 bytes, mostly by moving the Gentoo host build profile out of the @import chain into ~/.claude/HOST_BUILD.md, which MACHINE.md now points at. Nothing was deleted there either; it is referenced rather than loaded, the same arrangement this file has with PLAN.md. Worth being honest about the size of the win: ~10,400 bytes is roughly 2,200 tokens off each session start. It is real and permanent, but it is not what makes a long session expensive. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VETa8afmpWaYezLCqJhDB8