{"slug": "why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution", "title": "Why people chasing after useless token saving plugins and ignoring real solution", "summary": "A developer claims that token-saving plugins like RTK and Ponytail are ineffective, publishing benchmarks showing their agent harness achieves 80% real token savings on long-horizon tasks, while the plugins offer minimal or negative improvements. The author questions why the community ignores these results in favor of inferior solutions.", "body_md": "I wrote a blog yesterday on how useless RTK and Ponytail are on real coding tasks. And published my agent harness long-horizon task benchmarks on 80% real token saving.\n\nI just want to know why people just ignore the fact those pulgins are useless and don't care about the real savings?\n\nfull reports are on my repo: https://github.com/Tura-AI/tura\n\nArm n Harness score Total tokens Modeled cost Rounds Duration No plugin 2 78.85% 6.660M $5.281946 62.5 895s Ponytail 2 80.77% -7.56% -8.87% -9.60% +13.51% RTK 2 76.92% +13.20% +7.18% +44.00% +40.69%\n\nConfiguration Passes Pass rate Observed tokens Rounds Estimated cost Tura Balanced High 48/60 80.0% 229,695,477 2,017 $221.138 Tura Direct High 39/60 65.0% 75,108,167 969 $99.620 Codex CLI Medium 38/60 63.3% 333,538,349 3,140 $257.173 Codex CLI High 36/60 60.0% 455,742,296 6,074 $327.483\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937781)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937781", "published_at": "2026-07-16 17:46:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-16 17:55:55.602478+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Tura-AI", "RTK", "Ponytail", "Codex CLI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-people-chasing-after-useless-token-saving-plugins-and-ignoring-real-solution.jsonld"}}