ContextBudget

A live meter for how much irrelevant context your open tabs are dragging into every agent call.

Price: $19 one-time

Included free

• Status bar context-load meter from open tabs + size + recency
• Bloat flagging for large/rarely-referenced/duplicative tabs
• One-click 'close low-value tabs' trim

Unlocked with a license

• Claude Code session-transcript cross-referencing
• Context breakdown panel ranked by estimated weight

Roadmap

• vscode.lm-powered semantic relevance scoring ("is this file actually relevant to the current task") is planned but not implemented yet — the current relevance signal is limited to whether a file was touched by the most recent Claude Code session.

How the load score works

The status bar shows the sum of your open file-backed tabs' sizes on disk, weighted down by how long it's been since each file was last touched (VS Code doesn't expose a reliable "tab last focused" timestamp, so this uses the file's access/modified time on disk as an approximation — note that Windows disables last-access-time tracking by default, so this can fall back to modified time). If the same file is open in more than one tab (e.g. a split editor), it's only counted once toward the total so the meter reflects actual context, not duplicate views. The indicator is green under 300KB of weighted load, yellow up to 1.5MB, and red above that. Trim Low-Value Tabs flags tabs that are large (over 200KB), look generated (lockfiles, *.log, minified/map files), haven't been touched in 72+ hours, or are a duplicate view of a file already open elsewhere.

Getting a license

Open the ContextBudget sidebar (activity bar icon) and click Get License. After purchase you'll receive a license key — paste it into the sidebar and click Activate License. Keys are machine-locked; use Move to another machine… in the sidebar before reinstalling on a new device.