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MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

mksg.lu

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Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#41

Post by mksglu »

mvkel wrote: post #5

Excited to try this. Is this not in effect a kind of "pre-compaction," deciding ahead of time what's relevant? Are there edge cases where it is unaware of, say, a utility function that it coincidentally picks up when it just dumps everything?

Yeah it's basically pre-compaction, you're right. The key difference is nothing gets thrown away. The full output sits in a searchable FTS5 index, so if the model realizes it needs some detail it missed in the summary, it can search for it. It's less "decide what's relevant upfront" and more "give me the summary now, let me come back for specifics later."

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#43

Post by [deleted] »

re5i5tor wrote: post #14
mksglu wrote: post #2

Author here. I shared the GitHub repo a few days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148025 ) and got great feedback. This is the writeup explaining the architecture. The core idea: every MCP tool call dumps raw data into your 200K context window. Context Mode spawns isolated subprocesses — only stdout enters context. No LLM calls, purely algorithmic: SQLite FTS5 with BM25 ranking and Porter stemming. Since…

Really intrigued and def will try, thanks for this. In connecting the dots (and help me make sure I'm connecting them correctly), context-mode _does not address MCP context usage at all_, correct? You are instead suggesting we refactor or eliminate MCP tools, or apply concepts similar to context_mode in our MCPs where possible? Context-mode is still very high value, even if the answer is "no," just want to make sure…

[deleted]

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#45

Post by dematz »

tyre wrote: post #9
poly2it wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two LLMs speaking with each other on HN? Amusing!

Why are you assuming they’re an LLM? And please don’t say “em dash”. Note: you’re replying to the library’s author.

1st comment: 2 day old account, "is the real story here", summary -> comment -> question, general punchiness of style without saying that much. These llms feel like someone said "be an informal hacker news commenter" so they often end with "Curious how" instead of "I'm curious how" or "Worth building" instead of "It's worth building". Not that humans don't do any of this but all of it together in their comment history, you just get a general vibe.

author reply: not as obvious, but for one thing yes literally em dash, their post has 10 em dashes in 748 words, this comment has 2 em dashes in 115 words. Not that em dash = ai, but in the context of a post about AI it seems more likely. And finally, https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/cont... the file the author linked in their own repo does not exist!

(https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/src/... exists but they messed up the link?)

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#46

Post by esperent »

elephanlemon wrote: post #10
nr378 wrote: post #6

Nice work. It strikes me there's more low hanging fruit to pluck re. context window management. Backtracking strikes me as another promising direction to avoid context bloat and compaction (i.e. when a model takes a few attempts to do the right thing, once it's done the right thing, prune the failed attempts out of the context).

Agree. I’d like more fine grained control of context and compaction. If you spend time debugging in the middle of a session, once you’ve fixed the bugs you ought to be able to remove everything related to fixing them out of context and continue as you had before you encountered them. (Right now depending on your IDE this can be quite annoying to do manually. And I’m not aware of any that allow you to snip it out if y…

> For example, if you’re working with a tool that dumps a lot of logged information into context

I've set up a hook that blocks directly running certain common tools and instead tells Claude to pipe the output to a temporary file and search that for relevant info. There's still some noise where it tries to run the tool once, gets blocked, then runs it the right way. But it's better than before.

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#47

Post by RyanShook »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

This sounds a little bit like rkt? Which trims output from other CLI applications like git, find and the most common tools used by Claude. This looks like it goes a little further which is interesting. I see some of these AI companies adopting some of these ideas sooner or later. Trim the tokens locally to save on token usage. https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

I’m also trying to see which one makes more sense. Discussion about rtk started today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189599

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#48

Post by giancarlostoro »

mksglu wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

This sounds a little bit like rkt? Which trims output from other CLI applications like git, find and the most common tools used by Claude. This looks like it goes a little further which is interesting. I see some of these AI companies adopting some of these ideas sooner or later. Trim the tokens locally to save on token usage. https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

Haven't looked at rtk closely but from the description it sounds like it works at the CLI output level, trimming stdout before it reaches the model. Context-mode goes a bit further since it also indexes the full output into a searchable FTS5 database, so the model can query specific parts later instead of just losing them. It's less about trimming and more about replacing a raw dump with a summary plus on-demand retr…

Yeah I like this approach too. I made a tool similar to Beads and after learning about RTK I updated mine to produce less token hungry output. I'm still working on it.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#49

Post by esperent »

FuckButtons wrote: post #25
elephanlemon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I’d like more fine grained control of context and compaction. If you spend time debugging in the middle of a session, once you’ve fixed the bugs you ought to be able to remove everything related to fixing them out of context and continue as you had before you encountered them. (Right now depending on your IDE this can be quite annoying to do manually. And I’m not aware of any that allow you to snip it out if y…

Yeah, the fact that we have treated context as immutable baffles me, it’s not like humans working memory keeps a perfect history of everything they’ve done over the last hour, it shouldn’t be that complicated to train a secondary model that just runs online compaction, eg: it runs a tool call, the model determines what’s Germaine to the conversion and prunes the rest, or some task gets completed, ok just leave a stub…

Is it because of caching? If the context changes arbitrarily every turn then you would have to throw away the cache.

Re: MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%

#50

Post by esperent »

mksglu wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

This sounds a little bit like rkt? Which trims output from other CLI applications like git, find and the most common tools used by Claude. This looks like it goes a little further which is interesting. I see some of these AI companies adopting some of these ideas sooner or later. Trim the tokens locally to save on token usage. https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

Haven't looked at rtk closely but from the description it sounds like it works at the CLI output level, trimming stdout before it reaches the model. Context-mode goes a bit further since it also indexes the full output into a searchable FTS5 database, so the model can query specific parts later instead of just losing them. It's less about trimming and more about replacing a raw dump with a summary plus on-demand retr…

Does context mode only work with MCPs? Or does it work with bash/git/npm commands as well?
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