Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
An analysis of a skill, conducted without running it, which assigns each of its steps a share of the estimated consumption and draws from that an ordered list of costed optimizations.
Full definition
An audit, in ordinary usage, is a compliance check conducted on established facts. This isn't one: it is a reconstruction. The skill's content and the size of the files it handles — measured with wc when the files exist — serve to estimate each step's input and output volumes.
It runs in three phases: map the steps, measure the volumes, recommend. Its output is a dated report, valid for a described scenario — number of files processed, typical size of the data.
Usage in the field
Used when deploying a skill, when the limit is reached faster than usual, and periodically on the heaviest skills.
Synonyms and variants
"token optimization report", "/token_audit" after the name of the skill that produces it in Claude Code.
Not to be confused with
- execution telemetry — a record of the tokens actually consumed by a run, obtained by instrumenting the code.
- performance profiling — the distribution of time spent, not of spend.
- code review — an examination of the code's quality and correctness, independently of what it consumes.
Examples
/token_audit competitor_analyze, whose report assigns 21% of the total to reading the existing analyses.
Ambiguities / debates
The word "audit" suggests a certified measurement; what is produced here is an order of magnitude, announced as accurate to within fifteen per cent.