context-hygiene

Context window hygiene analyzer for LLM conversations.

Heuristic detection of staleness, contradictions, deadweight, and compression opportunities in CLAUDE.md files, prompt chains, and agent configs. No LLM required for basic analysis.

Install

pip install context-hygiene

Optional extras:

pip install "context-hygiene[anthropic]"  # AI-powered deep analysis
pip install "context-hygiene[watch]"      # Live file monitoring

Quick Start

# Audit a CLAUDE.md file (heuristics, no LLM)
ctx-hygiene audit CLAUDE.md

# Quick staleness score
ctx-hygiene score CLAUDE.md

# Auto-clean deadweight and stale segments
ctx-hygiene clean CLAUDE.md

# View audit history
ctx-hygiene history

# Check license and config
ctx-hygiene status

How It Works

context-hygiene parses structured context files into conversation segments and runs four heuristic analysis passes:

1. Staleness Detection

Identifies potentially outdated segments based on:

• Position decay — earlier segments in a long conversation are more likely stale
• Language patterns — detects corrections ("actually", "instead", "scratch that"), restarts ("let me start over"), and explicit staleness ("old", "deprecated")
• Error content — large traceback blocks after a fix is applied
• Short mid-conversation messages — often fragmented or superseded context

Scored 0–1 per segment (0 = fresh, 1 = completely stale).

2. Contradiction Detection

Finds conflicting instructions between user/system segments using regex pattern matching:

• Positive vs. negative directives ("use X" vs. "don't use X")
• Opposing adverbs ("always" vs. "never")
• Incompatible toggles ("enable" vs. "disable", "include" vs. "exclude")

Flagged with confidence score (currently fixed at 0.7; deep mode uses LLM for refinement).

3. Deadweight Detection

Identifies zero-influence messages that consume tokens without shaping output:

• Acknowledgment-only messages ("ok", "thanks", "got it")
• Filler words ("hmm", "um", "well")
• Assistant confirmation preambles ("Sure, I'd be happy to...")
• Exact duplicates of earlier segments
• Empty or whitespace-only messages

4. Compression Detection

Finds opportunities to condense without information loss:

• Consecutive same-role runs (3+ messages from user/assistant in a row)
• Large code blocks that could be referenced instead of inlined
• Verbose assistant explanations where prose exceeds code content

Fast vs. Deep Mode

Fast mode is sufficient for most use cases. Deep mode is useful when heuristic patterns miss nuanced semantic drift.

Free vs. Pro

Subscribe Monthly ($8/mo) | Subscribe Yearly ($69/yr)

All 5 Tools Bundle: Monthly ($29/mo) | Yearly ($199/yr) — includes claudemd-forge, agent-lint, ai-spend, promptctl, context-hygiene

After purchase, activate via:

export CONTEXT_HYGIENE_LICENSE="CTHG-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

Or save to ~/.config/context-hygiene/license.

Programmatic API

You can also use context-hygiene from Python without shelling out to the CLI:

from context_hygiene import audit_file, score_file

# Full audit report
report = audit_file("CLAUDE.md")
print(report.grade)               # 'B'
print(report.tokens_recoverable)  # 1,247

# Quick score
score = score_file("conversation.json")
print(score.grade)      # 'C'
print(score.staleness)  # 0.34

Before / After Demo

Before: A messy 14-segment conversation with stale instructions, deadweight, and contradictions.

Tokens: 1,847  |  Grade: D
- "ok" (deadweight)
- "Sure, let me know..." (assistant preamble)
- "Actually, scratch that. Use poetry instead." (supersedes prior pip advice)
- "Never mind, let me start over. I'll use uv instead." (supersedes poetry)
- "Use pip for everything" vs "Don't use pip, use poetry" (contradiction)

Run the cleaner:

ctx-hygiene clean conversation.md --apply
# Pruning plan: remove 4/14 segments
# Tokens: 1,847 → 1,124 (save 723)

After: The same conversation, pruned to 10 segments with no contradictions and no deadweight.

Tokens: 1,124  |  Grade: B  |  Recoverable: 723 tokens (39%)

What This Is (and Isn't)

context-hygiene is a practical heuristic tool, not a novel research metric. It doesn't measure "semantic entropy" or "information-theoretic density." It applies well-understood pattern-matching techniques to a specific problem: finding waste in LLM context windows.

If you're looking for:

• Token-level compression → LLMLingua, Selective Context
• Novelty scoring → Build your own embedding-based metric
• A quick sanity check before sending a long context → ctx-hygiene score does exactly that

Community

Discord — Join the community

License

BSL-1.1 (Business Source License 1.1)

The core heuristic analyzer is free to use and modify. AI-powered deep analysis (--deep) and live file monitoring (watch) require a Pro license.