Your code is also a context budget
There’s a lot of writing about how to prompt an LLM. Very little about what happens on the other side — the code the model reads every time it opens a file. When Claude Code works in a repository, it reads source files. It reads CLAUDE.md on every turn. It reads whatever documentation you’ve pointed it at. Every comment in every file it touches gets fed into context. Most of that happens invisibly, in the background, before you’ve typed a single word. ...