rtk

Agent-agnostic token optimization: compress, route, filter, and more.

One composable pipeline across everything your AI agent reads and sends — built on RTK's battle-tested bash-output compression (up to 90% smaller).

Website • Install • Troubleshooting • Architecture • Discord

English • Francais • 中文 • 日本語 • 한국어 • Espanol • Português

---

rtk filters and compresses command outputs before they reach your LLM context. Single Rust binary, 100+ supported commands, <10ms overhead.

What RTK Does

RTK intercepts shell commands and compresses their output before your agent reads it.

Operation	What RTK does to the output
ls / tree	Tree format with file counts instead of one line per entry
cat / read	Smart file reading: signatures and structure over full bodies
grep / rg	Truncates long lines, groups matches by file
ast-grep	Groups structural matches by file, caps overflow
git status	Compact stat format, grouped by state
git diff	Reduced context, headers stripped
git log	Hash, author and subject only
git add/commit/push	Confirmation line instead of full progress output
cargo test / npm test	Failures only, passing tests collapsed to a count
ruff check	Grouped by rule and file
sqlfluff lint	Grouped by rule and file
pytest	Failures only, traceback trimmed
go test	NDJSON parsed, failures only
docker ps	Essential fields only

How Savings Work

RTK reduces the bash output your agent reads. That is what RTK measures, and it is not the same as cutting your bill by the same amount.

Bash output is one contributor to input tokens, alongside your prompt, the system prompt and conversation history. Input tokens are in turn only part of the bill, which also counts output tokens. The reduction dilutes at every step.

The token counts RTK reports are estimated as bytes / 4 — RTK ships no tokenizer, so the percentages are reliable but the absolute token numbers are approximate.

Full explanation: How RTK Savings Work

Installation

brew install rtk                                              # macOS / Linux
winget install rtk-ai.rtk                                     # Windows
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rtk-ai/rtk/refs/heads/master/install.sh | sh

Then check you have the right package — another project named "rtk" exists on crates.io:

rtk --version   # any current version
rtk gain        # must show the savings dashboard, not "command not found"

Cargo, pre-built binaries, native Windows, WSL, and uninstall: Installation guide

What You Install

RTK ships as three downloads. The two rtk editions install a binary with the same name — hooks, scripts and agent config work unchanged across both — so they cannot be installed together. Uninstall one before installing the other.

flowchart TD
    agent["Your coding agent"]

    subgraph editions["Pick one · both install a binary named rtk"]
        direction LR
        full["<b>rtk</b>Apache-2.0 + BUSL-1.1hooks · filters · engine"]
        oss["<b>rtk-oss</b>Apache-2.0 onlyhooks · filters"]
    end