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...