Usage Limit Reducer — Development skill for Claude Code

usage-limit-reducer

A Claude Code skill that stops you from burning through your usage limit.

Claude re-reads the entire conversation on every turn. One developer measured it: **98.5% of his tokens went to re-reading history, only 1.5% to generating responses.** This skill diagnoses where your tokens are actually going and applies Dubi's 11 rules for cutting usage — using real data from the JSONL logs Claude Code already writes to your disk.

What it does

When you trigger the skill, it:

1. Measures — runs scripts/usage-report.py against ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl and shows token/cost breakdowns by model, project, and day (with cache-hit % and heuristic callouts).
2. Diagnoses the current session — conversation length, CLAUDE.md presence, model in use.
3. Applies the 2–4 rules most relevant to what it finds. No dumping all 11 on you.
4. Suggests concrete next actions (/compact, /clear, /model claude-haiku-4-5, create CLAUDE.md, etc.) and acts only on confirmation.

Install

git clone  ~/.claude/skills/usage-limit-reducer

Or, if you already cloned it elsewhere:

cp -r . ~/.claude/skills/usage-limit-reducer/

Restart Claude Code. It will show up in the skills list and auto-trigger on phrases like:

• "hit my limit" / "usage limit" / "running out of tokens"
• "save tokens" / "reduce usage" / "am I wasting tokens"
• "this chat is getting long"
• "which model should I use"

You can also invoke it directly: `/usage-limit-reducer`.

Standalone: the token report

The script is useful on its own, outside the skill:

python3 ~/.claude/skills/usage-limit-reducer/scripts/usage-report.py --days 7
python3 ~/.claude/skills/usage-limit-reducer/scripts/usage-report.py --days 30 --project myrepo
python3 ~/.claude/skills/usage-limit-reducer/scripts/usage-report.py --json   # machine-readable

Example output:

Claude Code usage — last 7 day(s)
------------------------------------------------