claude-slim

Your Claude Code session burns thousands of tokens before you even say "hello."

Every session auto-loads every skill, agent, slash command, memory file, and plugin instruction into the system prompt — even the ones you never use. If you run OMC, marketplace plugins, or a custom skill stack, you're paying for context you'll never touch on every single turn. claude-slim measures that startup overhead and removes what you don't need.

No proxy, no compression, no changes to how Claude Code talks to the API — it reads ~/.claude/, tells you what each skill and plugin actually costs, and moves the dead weight aside reversibly.

/claude-slim

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See it in action

claude-slim cleanup: 11,442 tokens of overhead reduced to ~5,800 in 45 seconds

Where the bloat hides:

Source	Typical overhead
60+ registered skills	~3,000 tokens
CLAUDE.md (plugin instructions)	~5,000 tokens
Memory files	~2,500 tokens
Deferred tools list	~1,500 tokens
Total	~12,000 tokens

That's slower responses. Hitting your usage cap faster. Paying for context you're not using.

One command. Five steps.

/claude-slim

 ┌────────┐   ┌──────────┐   ┌─────────┐   ┌─────────┐   ┌────────┐
 │  Scan  │ → │ Classify │ → │ Propose │ → │  Clean  │ → │ Report │
 │        │   │          │   │         │   │         │   │        │
 │measure │   │ broken   │   │  you    │   │ move to │   │before  │
 │ every  │   │ dupes    │   │ choose  │   │.disabled│   │  vs    │
 │source  │   │ bloat    │   │  what   │   │  dir    │   │ after  │
 └────────┘   └──────────┘   └─────────┘   └─────────┘   └────────┘

Scan — Measures everything: local skills, plugin skills, CLAUDE.md, memory files, MCP servers. Token counts are measured with js-tiktoken, not guessed.

Classify — Finds the waste automatically:

	What it catches
Broken symlinks	Dead links from uninstalled skill packs
Duplicates	Same skill registered from multiple sources
Empty templates	Placeholder skills with no content
Oversized files	SKILL.md over 10KB
Unused skills	Local skills never invoked in your last N days of sessions (default 60d)
Agents & commands	`~/.claude/agents/` and `~/.claude/commands/` — measured and reported, never modified
Unused plugins	Plugins whose skill/mcp/cmd were never invoked in your last N days of sessions (default 60d). Tier 3, never auto-selected.
Stale memory	Large memory files loaded every session
Disabled plugins	Installed but disabled plugins still in cache
Stale projects	Project memory untouched for 90+ days
Temp caches	Failed plugin install remnants (`temp_local_*`)

Propose — Three tiers, you decide:

Tier	Action	Example
Auto	Pre-selected	Broken symlinks, empty templates, temp caches
Recommended	Suggested	Duplicates, stale memory, disabled plugins, stale projects
Optional	Your call	Oversized skills you might still use

Clean — Moves selected skills and project memory to ~/.claude/skills.disabled/. Failed-install temp caches and dead symlink files are the only permanent cleanups, and they are labeled before selection.

Report — Shows exactly what changed:

╭──────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  claude-slim report                      │
│                                          │
│  Before: 14,510 tokens at startup        │
│  After:   5,181 tokens at startup        │
│  Saved:   9,329 tokens (64.3%)           │
│                                          │
│  Top offenders removed:                  │
│  • office-hours              23,008 tok  │
│  • harness                    7,902 tok  │
│  • manpower                   4,764 tok  │
│                                          │
│  Est. monthly savings: ~$1.68            │
│  (2 sessions/day × $0.003/1K tok)        │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────╯

  ┌──────────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬────────────┐
  │                  │  Before  │  After   │  Saved     │
  ├──────────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼────────────┤
  │ Local skills     │    14    │     4    │  -10       │
  │ System prompt    │   ~124   │   ~114   │  -10       │
  │ Memory files     │  19.5KB  │   5.7KB  │  -13.8KB   │
  │ Est. tokens      │ ~14,510  │  ~5,181  │  ~9,329    │
  └──────────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴────────────┘

Try it (10 seconds)

No install needed — run once and see what's in your ~/.claude/:

npx claude-slim scan

Happy with what you see? Make it part of your Claude Code workflow:

claude plugin marketplace add iops-leo/claude-slim
claude plugin install claude-slim

Then just type /claude-slim in any session.

Usage

/claude-slim                          # Full pipeline: scan → propose → clean → report
/claude-slim scan                     # Report only, no changes
/claude-slim scan --json              # Machine-readable JSON output
/claude-slim scan --lookback-days 30  # Treat skills idle for 30+ days as unused
/claude-slim doctor                   # Check scanner prerequisites and data fidelity
/claude-slim restore                  # Bring back anything you disabled

CLI equivalents:

npx claude-slim clean                    # Full pipeline
npx claude-slim clean --dry-run          # See what would happen (no changes)
npx claude-slim clean --auto             # Non-interactive, Tier 1 only (CI/scripts)
npx claude-slim clean --lookback-days N  # Tune the unused-skill detection window
npx claude-slim scan                     # Report only
npx claude-slim doctor                   # Diagnose Node/Claude/session-log readiness
npx claude-slim restore                  # Undo
npx claude-slim report                   # Show savings from last clean

Safety first


Non-destructive for user data	Skills and project memory move to `~/.claude/skills.disabled/`
Reversible where state exists	`/claude-slim restore` brings moved skills and project memory back
User-controlled	Interactive runs ask before changes. `--dry-run` previews; `--auto` selects Tier 1 only.
Hands off	Never touches CLAUDE.md, settings.json, or plugin configs
Scoped	All operations are refused if the target path escapes `~/.claude/`

What claude-slim never touches

~/.claude/CLAUDE.md — your system instructions, read-only.
~/.claude/settings.json — MCP server config, hooks, and any other settings. Read-only.
Plugin internals (~/.claude/plugins/config.json, individual plugin.json files) — left alone; use claude plugin to manage plugins.
Git / project sources — claude-slim only looks inside ~/.claude/, never at your code.
Anything outside ~/.claude/ — a path-containment guard refuses destructive ops anywhere else, even if a tampered manifest asked it to.

Only touched: entries under ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.claude/plugins/cache/temp_local_*, and ~/.claude/projects/*/memory/. Skill and memory entries are moved to skills.disabled/; broken symlink files are unlinked and temp_local_* failed-install caches are removed outright.

How it works

claude-slim scans these locations. No plugin-specific logic — pure filesystem analysis.

~/.claude/
├── skills/                  ← user-installed skills
├── plugins/cache/           ← plugin skills, agents, commands, MCP servers
├── agents/                  ← user agents (measured, read-only)
├── commands/                ← user slash commands (measured, read-only)
├── CLAUDE.md                ← system instructions (read-only)
├── projects/*/memory/       ← auto-memory files (current project counts toward startup)
└── settings.json            ← MCP server count (read-only)

Works with any setup: OMC, gstack, marketplace plugins, custom skills, or vanilla Claude Code.

Real-world results

From a real cleanup session:

Metric	Before	After
Local skills	65	15	-77%
System prompt skills	~80	~48	-40%
Memory files	15KB	2KB	-87%
Est. token savings		~4,300/session

v2.8.0 — What's new

Accuracy release. Three reported numbers were wrong; the largest was wrong by an order of magnitude. If your startup estimate drops sharply after upgrading, the old number was the inaccurate one.

Startup estimate no longer sums memory across every project on disk. Claude Code loads ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/memory/ for the project you're in — not the other 40 project directories in your ~/.claude. The old total scaled with how many projects you'd ever opened: on the dev machine it reported 116,259 tokens where the real per-session cost was 14,399. Now scoped to the current project, with the cross-project total still shown and labelled as not a per-session cost.
Skill listing cost is measured, not assumed. Each skill adds a - <name>: <description> line to the system prompt. The flat 30-tokens-per-skill estimate stood in for all of them; measured across 68 installed skills the real spread is 30 → 509 tokens (mean 51). The per-plugin cost gradient can now tell five terse skills apart from five verbose ones.
~/.claude/agents/ and ~/.claude/commands/ are now scanned. Previously invisible despite loading into every session — 12 agents worth ~2,254 tokens on the dev machine. Reported only; never moved or deleted, because there's no restore path for them yet.
Fixed: plugin manifests were stuck at 2.7.0 for three releases, so claude plugin install advertised a stale version. CI now fails on version drift.
Fixed: the token cache grew without bound — 355 of 776 entries (46%) pointed at deleted files. flushCache() now prunes them.

Tests: 206 → 241 (+35).

For older release notes, see CHANGELOG.md.

Requirements

Node.js 20+
macOS or Linux
Claude Code CLI

License

MIT