Comment by ProjectBarks

It seems like most of these tools are mostly vaporware. Benchmarks done on Headroom and RTK show that neither result in real savings. If it were possible to have such a simple pre-process step why wouldn’t the AI Labs upstream the optimizations themselves? My guess is they mostly don’t work or make the behavior much more confusing for the model. I really think there needs to be some kind of independent benchmark.

Here are other cases demonstrating the exact same issues with these kinds of tools:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/rtk-claude-code-token-... https://brandonbarker.me/writing/headroom-fewer-tokens-bigge...