Here is a number that should worry anyone paying for Claude Code by the token. A single Playwright snapshot costs 56 KB of context. Twenty GitHub issues cost 59 KB. One access log, 45 KB. Every MCP tool call dumps raw data straight into the context window, and after about 30 minutes of real work, 40% of it is gone.

Then comes the second blow. When the conversation gets too long, the agent compacts it to free space, and the compaction wipes its working memory. It forgets which files it was editing, what tasks were in progress, and what you last asked for. You spend the next ten minutes re-explaining everything.

And there is a third leak most people never notice: the agent burns output tokens on filler, pleasantries and verbose explanations, eating context from both sides at once.

This is the problem Context Mode was built for. It is an open-source MCP server by mksglu that attacks context bloat from four directions simultaneously, and the numbers are startling: 315 KB of raw tool output becomes 5.4 KB.…