A build log about protocol archaeology, three wrong guesses, and refusing to trust my own mocks.
The token bill that started it
Claude Design (claude.ai/design) is a nice place to keep a design system, but the files live there, on the server. The obvious way to get them onto disk is to ask an agent: "read every file in this project and write it locally." That works. On one large project I measured, it also cost about 665,000 tokens — because every byte of every file has to pass through the model's context on the way out.
That number is silly. Moving bytes from A to B is not a reasoning task. The model is being used as a very expensive cp.
So I wanted a plain CLI that syncs a Claude Design project to a local directory the way git syncs a repo — clone, pull, push, status, diff — where the file bytes never touch a model's context. The same pull that cost 665k tokens should cost one summary line:
