If you read my earlier post on the Skill Vault pattern , you know I cut Claude Code's per-session overhead by 96%. After living with it for a few weeks, I went looking for what was still eating tokens — and found three more sinks worth killing.

This is the follow-up: smaller wins individually, but together they shaved another ~5,000 tokens off every single session with zero capability lost.

Where the Tokens Were Still Hiding

After the vault, my baseline was around 51K tokens per session. I dug into the system prompt to see what remained:

Skill list (still): ~3K tokens

Project CLAUDE.md : ~2K tokens

claude-mem auto-injected timeline: ~2K tokens

Plugin hook reminders: ~1K tokens (some recurring per turn)

Three of these were either unnecessary or way overweight. Here's how I killed each.

Sink #1: A Bloated Root CLAUDE.md (~1.5K tokens)

CLAUDE.md files auto-load into every session that touches the repo.…