Stop Paying for Noise: Trim LLM Tokens from Both Ends of the Pipe (opens in new tab)

The Token Tax You Are Paying Every time an LLM-powered coding agent runs cargo test or git status, it swallows reams of output. Most of that is noise—progress bars, ANSI escapes, empty lines. You pay for every token. On the other side, verbose model replies burn even more. The result is a slow, expensive loop that scales badly. Two open-source tools attack the problem from opposite ends of the pipe. RTK strips input noise before it reaches the model. caveman forces the model to talk like, wel...