The Token Compression Illusion

Przemek Mroczek's critique of RTK — a tool claiming 60-90% token cost reduction by compressing CLI output for AI agents — lands a specific technical argument: the savings are measured on terminal output alone, which is not what's expensive; the compression happens silently without telling the agent context was stripped; and there's no published data on whether tasks actually succeed. The post is a useful diagnostic for a broader pattern in agent cost tooling.

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The Harness Is the Product

Sebastian Raschka published a technical breakdown of what a coding agent harness actually needs — six components that often matter more than the model itself. The same day, Imbue's case study on running 100+ Claude agents in parallel to test and improve their own tooling arrived on Hacker News. Together they sketch what production-grade agent engineering looks like right now.

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