What's Loaded MCP server

whats-loaded-mcp

Your context window is already half spent before you type. An MCP server that shows what is consuming it — every skill description, every memory file and its hidden @imports, every configured MCP server — ranked by cost, with duplicates called out.

Why

Skills are cheap to install and permanently expensive to keep. A skill's name and description go into the system prompt of every session, forever — only the body is loaded on demand. Install a few hundred and you've quietly mortgaged half your window before the first message.

Nothing surfaces this. You notice it as sessions that compact sooner than they used to, and you have no idea which of the things you installed six months ago is responsible.

On the machine this was written on:

# Context budget — cost before you type a single character

**~95,316 estimated tokens always loaded.**
For scale: ~47.7% of a 200K window, ~9.5% of a 1M window.

| Source                                       | Count |  Est. tokens |
|----------------------------------------------|------:|-------------:|
| Skill descriptions                           | 1,767 |       92,884 |
| Memory files (CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md + imports) |     3 |        2,432 |
| MCP servers configured                       |    10 | not measured |
| **Total measurable**                         |       |   **95,316** |

> **79 duplicate skill names** are costing ~9,435 tokens.

79 names were installed more than once — the same skill picked up from several sources, like agent-browser appearing three times from three authors. But a shared name does not always mean a redundant copy: on that install only 34 groups were byte-identical (~1,523 tokens genuinely recoverable), while 45 shared a name and differed in content — different work wearing the same label, where deleting a copy loses something. duplicate_skills compares content hashes and reports those two groups separately, so the cleanup advice is safe to act on rather than merely impressive.

Tools

Install

Claude Desktop (one-click, no terminal): download the latest whats-loaded-mcp-.dxt from Releases and open it with Claude Desktop (double-click, or Settings → Extensions → Install Extension…). The server and its dependencies ship inside the bundle — no npm, no Node install.

Register with Claude Code (available in every session):

claude mcp add --scope user whats-loaded -- npx -y whats-loaded-mcp

Or in any MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "whats-loaded": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "whats-loaded-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

From source

git clone https://github.com/stcmain/whats-loaded-mcp.git
cd whats-loaded-mcp
npm install && npm run build
# then point your client at node /path/to/whats-loaded-mcp/dist/index.js

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.