RTK

// Overview

RTK — "Rust Token Killer" — is a command-line proxy that sits between an AI coding agent and the shell commands it runs. Agent loops burn most of their context on raw tool output: pages of `git status`, a full `pytest` run, a `docker build` log. RTK intercepts that output and compresses it before the model ever sees it, which the project measures at a 60–90% reduction on common development commands.

It compresses with four strategies rather than a model: intelligent filtering to drop noise, grouping to aggregate similar items, truncation that preserves the relevant context, and deduplication to collapse repeated lines. The rules are command-aware — git operations report the confirmation instead of the progress chatter, test runners surface only failures, build tools group errors by file — and it covers more than a hundred commands across git, cargo, npm/pnpm, pytest, docker, the AWS CLI and more.

RTK ships as a single dependency-free Rust binary with under 10 ms of overhead, installable from Homebrew, an install script, Cargo, or pre-built releases for macOS, Linux and Windows. `rtk init` wires it into an agent through that agent's hook or plugin API — the project lists integrations for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Codex, Windsurf, Cline, Kilo Code and others — after which plain commands are transparently rewritten to their `rtk` equivalents. An `rtk gain` dashboard reports the token savings over a 30-day history. It is Apache-2.0 licensed.

// What it does

• Command-aware compression of 100+ dev commands (git, cargo, npm/pnpm, pytest, docker, AWS CLI and more)
• Four non-model strategies — filtering, grouping, context-preserving truncation and deduplication
• Single Rust binary with no dependencies and under 10 ms of overhead per command
• Auto-rewrite hook that transparently turns `git status` into `rtk git status` inside the agent
• One-command setup per agent via `rtk init`, with integrations for Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Codex, Windsurf, Cline and others
• `rtk gain` analytics dashboard tracking token savings across a 30-day history
• Per-command exclusions and a "tee" mode that keeps full output on failures, configured in a single TOML file

// Getting started

Install the binary, then run `rtk init` for whichever agent you use and restart it. Nothing else changes — your commands keep the same names.

brew install rtk

# or, on Linux/macOS:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rtk-ai/rtk/refs/heads/master/install.sh | sh

# or from source:
cargo install --git https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

rtk init -g                    # Claude Code / Copilot (default)
rtk init -g --gemini           # Gemini CLI
rtk init -g --agent cursor     # Cursor
rtk init --agent cline         # Cline / Roo Code

rtk gain

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Stop a coding agent from filling its context window with build, test and git output
• Cut the per-run cost of long agent loops without changing the model or the prompt
• Keep long agentic sessions coherent by leaving more of the window for actual reasoning
• Measure where an agent's tokens are actually going, per command, with `rtk gain`

// How RTK compares

RTK alongside other open-source context compression & token budgets tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.