[SOLAR_FIELDS]

These companies all wax on about how important context engineering is yet not one of them has released acceptable tooling for end users to visualize and understand the context window as it grows and shrinks during a session. Best Claude code can do? Warn you when you hit 80% full

[krystofee]

try /context in Claude Code

[grim_io]

A very crude tool. A good start maybe, but it does not give us any information about the message part of the context, the one that matters.

We can't really do much with the information that x amount is reserved for MCP, tool calling or the system prompt.

[simonbw]

> We can't really do much with the information that x amount is reserved for MCP, tool calling or the system prompt.

I actually think this is pretty useful information. It helps you evaluate whether an MCP server is worth the context cost. Similar for getting a feel for how much context certain tool uses use up. I feel like there's a way you can change the system prompt, and so that helps you evaluate if what you've got there is worth it also.

[grim_io]

Sure, it's useful, once.

What we need is a way to manage the dynamic part of the context without just starting from zero each time.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

My theory is that you will never get this from a frontier model provider because as is alluded to in sibling thread the context window management is actually a good hunk of the secret sauce that makes these things effective and companies do not want to give that up

[joshribakoff]

Cursor has a circular progress bar for context usage.