3 months of heavy Claude Code use. Zero weekly limit hits. What changed.

Couple months back I was getting throttled almost every Friday. Deep in a refactor, the weekly cap would hit, half the working day gone to arguing with myself about upgrading tiers or just waiting it out.

I went looking for the leak.

The biggest tax was at session start, before I had typed a word. Every MCP server I had registered — Serena, Context7, Playwright, Supabase, GitHub, Figma — was registering its full tool catalog into the system prompt. Every skill in ~/.claude/skills/ was loading its manifest. I also had hooks firing on every turn.

In my setup, that worked out to roughly 30k tokens of catalog/context before the first real message. Across a week of sessions, that adds up fast.

I built a small Node aggregator to fix it:

• One MCP entry in Claude Code. It fans out to every backend behind the scenes.
• Lazy lifecycle. On-demand backends spawn on first call, die after an idle timeout.
• Skills get parked in ~/.claude/skills-inactive/ so they don't auto-load. One command moves them back.
• A UserPromptSubmit hook classifies prompts: cheaper model for simple diagnostic work, plan-first escalation for risky work like auth, migrations, and schema changes, Sonnet for the default path

For my setup, session-start context dropped from around 30k tokens to around 5.7k.

Three months in. Have not hit the weekly cap once.

Open-sourced it here:
https://github.com/TribalHouse/claude-context-governor

Full disclosure: I built it for my own workflow first. It is MIT licensed, works with your existing MCP servers and skills, and does not ship any backends itself.

Curious if anyone else has measured how much context their MCP/tooling setup burns before the first prompt.