Hitting ¥1.2M/month taught me something I didn't expect: keeping the environment healthy has to come before doing the work.
Why this system pays off
Adding a plugin to Claude Code takes a second. "Let's add context7." "Let's add playwright." "Might as well try expose too." Before I noticed, I had more than 50 plugins enabled. That's where the problem starts.
Every time Claude Code starts, a deferred tools section expands inside a system-reminder block. It's the part that enumerates every tool name owned by the connected MCP servers. The more plugins you have, the more that section swells. playwright alone lines up close to 30 tool names, from browser_click to browser_wait_for.
This is a quiet tax on the context window. The first few thousand characters of input tokens in every single session disappear into a list of tool names that have nothing to do with the actual work. It shows up as degraded response accuracy early in a session, or as "that piece of information" getting pushed out at the end of a long conversation.
