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...

> If it were possible to have such a simple pre-process step why wouldn’t the AI Labs upstream the optimizations themselves?

Not defending these tools, but one reason these might not be upstreamed is because it would negatively impact vendor margins, and they have no incentive to save their users money

Even JetBrains is now AI blog-slop, how disappointing.