Sethian (@theSethian) “You're paying Claude to read garbage it never uses. Headroom cut one code search” — TopicDigg

You're paying Claude to read garbage it never uses. Headroom cut one code search from 17,765 tokens to 1,408 and returned the same answer. Nathan Hodgson's video shows Headroom at 39K GitHub stars. The repo has already passed 59K. Claude Code carries logs, files, database dumps, and tool results into context. A few useful lines can arrive wrapped in thousands of tokens of noise. Headroom sits between the agent and the model, compresses that clutter before Claude reads it, and passes on a smaller version. Installation takes one command. The 92% figure belongs to that specific code-search benchmark. It isn't a guaranteed discount across every session. The article below targets terminal output with RTK, using a Claude Code hook that rewrites Bash commands before they run: > git status becomes rtk git status > tests return failures instead of every passing line > repeated log messages are grouped > builds, diffs, and search results are condensed In RTK's 30-minute project estimate, command-output usage falls from roughly 118,000 tokens to 23,900. RTK only intercepts Bash calls. Claude's built-in Read, Grep, and Glob tools bypass the hook, so this works best when terminal output is eating the context. If Claude spends most of the session in Bash, I'd start with the RTK setup in the article.