token budget optimization

The insight directly addresses reducing token consumption for meta-context while preserving human readability.

Token cost spikes on misrouted requests suggest context window management is critical to both quality and cost in multi-agent systems

The 3000-character limit is an explicit token budget constraint; this is a practical instantiation of managing context window costs.

Per-teammate model selection (Opus for debugger, Haiku for quality) is explicit token/cost optimization based on task requirements

Mentions 'limited context window (maximum number of tokens)' as the core constraint that context engineering must solve for.

ICE depends on strategic token placement and composition within context windows. This validates that not all tokens are equal—position, sequencing, and curation matter.

Author's solution assumes per-account token budgets should be shareable across sessions, which contradicts per-session token tracking design