Tokenade is now Open Source

Cut your AI coding agent's token bill — locally, automatically, on every prompt.

Install · What it does · Benchmark · Website

Tokenade is a single Rust binary that sits between your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot CLI, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Qwen Code…) and the model. It strips what the model never needed to see — 2,000-line build logs, whole files when one function mattered, verbose MCP payloads, re-reads of content already in context — before it is billed, and keeps every byte it folds recoverable on demand.

Tokenade ranks #1 on THOL, the Token-Harness Optimizer Leaderboard — real end-to-end agent runs, every optimizer measured the same way: 39% cheaper on long sessions. Method and full results: https://tokenade.net/en/thol.

• Command compaction — test runs, builds, logs,git ,kubectl ,docker , package managers… noisy output is folded to what matters (failures, numbers, decisive lines) before the agent reads it.
• Read deduplication — content the agent already has comes back as a short reference, or as a diff when it changed.
• Code intelligence —map ,query ,skeleton ,impact and hybridsemantic search, so the agent stops reading whole files to find one thing.
• MCP optimization — MCP servers are wrapped: responses compacted in transit, tool manifests trimmed to their callable skeleton.
• Web —tokenade web /tokenade search return compact Markdown and result lists instead of raw HTML.
• Context and output — prompt-cache-aware compaction of stale context, and a lean-output style note that drops filler without dropping facts.
• Secret redaction — credentials are scrubbed from what Tokenade logs, caches and folds.
• Nothing is lost — every fold carries a hash;tokenade expand-ref gives the exact bytes back.

npm install -g @tokenade/cli
tokenade install      # detects your coding agents and wires Tokenade in
tokenade healthcheck  # optional: verify the wiring

The binary for your platform ships as an optional per-platform npm package; if that is skipped, postinstall downloads the archive from this repository's GitHub Release and checks it against the release's Ed25519-signed manifest (SHA-256). Linux (x64 glibc/musl, arm64), macOS (x64, arm64), Windows (x64, arm64). Node ≥ 18.

Prebuilt archives are also attached to every GitHub Release.

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain (rustup) and a C/C++ compiler (tree-sitter grammars and SQLite are compiled from source).

git clone https://github.com/pi-infected/tokenade
cd tokenade
cargo install --locked --path crates/tokenade-cli   # or use a script below
tokenade install

Per-OS scripts in scripts/build/ build the same targets as the release CI and print where the binary is:

• Linux (x86_64 / aarch64):scripts/build/build-linux.sh for a native glibc build;--musl for a static binary (usescargo zigbuild if installed);--target <triple> for anything else.lld is used as linker on x86_64 when present.
• macOS (Xcode Command Line Tools):scripts/build/build-macos.sh for this Mac's architecture;--target aarch64-apple-darwin (Apple Silicon) or--target x86_64-apple-darwin (Intel);--universal for both, merged withlipo .
• Windows (PowerShell):.\scripts\build\build-windows.ps1 buildsx86_64-pc-windows-gnu with a static CRT; it needs MinGW-w64 (gcc ,g++ ) onPATH , e.g. from MSYS2.-Target aarch64-pc-windows-gnullvm builds ARM64 withllvm-mingw .

The semantic-search embedding model is downloaded on first use (Hugging Face, with a signed GitHub Release asset as fallback) and cached; set TOKENADE_MODEL_DIR to a directory that already holds it for offline machines.

Full integration (hooks: command compaction, read dedup, web, MCP, code search, lean output, context optimization): Claude Code, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Copilot CLI, Hermes, Cline, T3 Code.

Most features: OpenClaw and Pi (no MCP wrapping); Qwen Code (no web replacement); Codex CLI and the Codex app, Cursor, Grok (no web replacement or read dedup); Droid (no web, MCP wrapping or read dedup).

Partial: Aider (run commands through tokenade wrap …), Antigravity and Claude Desktop chat (MCP optimization only). Claude Desktop's Code tab runs Claude Code and gets full integration.

tokenade install --only <agent> limits the install to one agent; tokenade uninstall removes everything it added.

Your savings ledger and dashboard (tokenade gain, tokenade dashboard) stay on your machine. The only network calls are:

• the ones you ask for (tokenade web ,tokenade search );
• the one-time embedding-model download (see above);
• a daily auto-update check that reads the signedmanifest.json of the latest GitHub Release and only installs a binary whose signature and SHA-256 verify.

Turn auto-update off with TOKENADE_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 (or tokenade upgrade --off); tokenade upgrade updates on demand. TOKENADE_NO_WEBSEARCH=1 / TOKENADE_NO_WEBFETCH=1 keep your agent's own web tools.

1.x installs update themselves to 2.0 (or run npm i -g @tokenade/cli@latest). On its first run, 2.0 deletes the leftover 1.x licence, quota and usage-report files under ~/.tokenade once and keeps your savings history. tokenade login, activate and report no longer exist. Run tokenade install again if your agent's hooks look stale.

tokenade wrap 'cargo test'          # run a noisy command, get the compacted output
some-cmd | tokenade read -          # compact any blob; format auto-detected
tokenade map                        # codebase structure
tokenade query parse_config         # locate a symbol
tokenade skeleton src/lib.rs        # signatures only
tokenade semantic "where is auth"   # search by meaning
tokenade expand-ref <hash>          # get folded bytes back
tokenade dashboard                  # what you saved: graphical local report
tokenade gain                       # same totals, in the terminal
tokenade help                       # everything else

Bug reports, compactor fixtures and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct. Security issues: see SECURITY.md.

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE )
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT )

at your option (MIT OR Apache-2.0).

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.