Show HN: RTK – Wrap your CLI commands, save 60-90% of tokens in AI coding agents

I use Claude Code all day and got tired of watching it eat tokens on noisy CLI output. git status on a big repo, find across a project, cargo test with 200 lines of compilation — none of that noise is useful to the model.

So I built RTK. It wraps commands and strips the junk before it reaches your context: rtk git status # instead of git status rtk find "*.rs" . # compact results rtk ls . # token-optimized tree rtk cargo test # just the test results

My rtk gain -q after 15 days of real usage: Total commands: 7,061 Input tokens: 29.3M Output tokens: 4.8M Tokens saved: 24.6M (83.7%)

Biggest surprise was rtk find — directory listings are insanely wasteful. Run rtk discover on your Claude Code session history to see how many tokens you've been wasting — that's what convinced me to actually build this. Rust, MIT licensed. Happy to hear what commands are the worst token offenders for you.

https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

Love this tool

RTK - 15-Day Summary (Jan 28 → Feb 11)

  - 7,081 commands intercepted, 24.6M chars saved out of 29.4M input → 83.6% average reduction
  - Peak efficiency: 96%+ on heavy implementation days (Feb 3-4, ~11.6M input on Feb 4 alone)
  - Busiest day: Feb 2 with 1,413 commands (but only 39% savings — likely many non-RTK commands)
  - Most productive week: Feb 2-8 → 4,916 cmds, 19.4M chars saved
  - This week trending lower (77.5% savings) — likely more complex pipes/unsupported commands
  - Bottom line: ~24M characters of context window saved in 2 weeks. That's significant token budget reclaimed.

Still in discovery but for the moment, great tool. Hope to have the gain of Florian !!

But currently waiting for quota to reset .... Daaammmm

RTK Token Savings ════════════════════════════════════════

Total commands: 637

Input tokens: 6.3M

Output tokens: 1.3M

Tokens saved: 5.0M (79.3%)

Total exec time: 30m33s (avg 2.9s)

In 1 week. Numbers speak for themselves.