The Token Tax You Are Paying
Every time an LLM-powered coding agent runs cargo test or git status, it swallows reams of output. Most of that is noise—progress bars, ANSI escapes, empty lines. You pay for every token. On the other side, verbose model replies burn even more. The result is a slow, expensive loop that scales badly.
Two open-source tools attack the problem from opposite ends of the pipe. RTK strips input noise before it reaches the model. caveman forces the model to talk like, well, a caveman. Together they keep more of your token budget for work that matters.
How RTK Compresses the Input Stream
RTK is an OSS CLI proxy. It sits between your terminal and the LLM, reading command output and dropping everything that is not signal.
