If you read my earlier post on the Skill Vault pattern , you know I cut Claude Code's per-session overhead by 96%. After living with it for a few weeks, I went looking for what was still eating tokens — and found three more sinks worth killing. This is the follow-up: smaller wins individually, but together they shaved another ~5,000 tokens off every single session with zero capability lost. Where the Tokens Were Still Hiding After the vault, my baseline was around 51K tokens per session. I dug into the system prompt to see what remained: Skill list (still): ~3K tokens Project CLAUDE.md : ~2K tokens claude-mem auto-injected timeline: ~2K tokens Plugin hook reminders: ~1K tokens (some recurring per turn) Three of these were either unnecessary or way overweight. Here's how I killed each. Sink #1: A Bloated Root CLAUDE.md (~1.5K tokens) CLAUDE.md files auto-load into every session that touches the repo.…