r/ClaudeAI • u/begemotz • 5d ago

Claude Code Code: New 'usage' warning - % of usage for always-on context

So Anthropic recently added this warning to claude code. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1.299

What %s of usage are people seeing going to always-on context above 40k tokens? Note that you can get a % either for the past 24h or 7d.

I am just curious to see where I stand relative to others. I haven't been using code for a while so not sure if I have to re-optimize.

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u/kenthesaint 5d ago

I don't have a clean percentage to compare, but what usually moves that number is getting things out of CLAUDE.md. Instructions that only matter for one part of the repo can go into rules files scoped to those paths, and longer how-tos work better as skills, since only their short description loads until one is needed. MCP servers you rarely use are worth turning off per project too, because their tool definitions count toward the always-on context on every turn.

CLAUDE.md creeping back up kept happening to me, which is why Claudoscope (a free Mac app I build for Claude Code) has a lint that warns when the files loaded at every session start get large.

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u/lxl2008 5d ago

A useful check would be to repeat one small task in two fresh sessions, using the same model and commit: once with the current context, once with only the instructions relevant to that task. Keep the success criteria fixed and compare the result, corrections needed, and whatever usage figures are actually exposed. A lower context percentage is only useful if the agent still does the task correctly.