Hey everyone!
I wrote up a guide on setting up RTK + Headroom for Claude Code token compression. Both tools are well-known at this point, but getting them wired up and working together takes some troubleshooting.
I really cannot recommend these tools enough, even after getting caught in Anthropic's usage A/B testing, RTK and Headroom kept my session limits manageable through the worst of it.
But they're a bit of a pain to configure. I came across silent PATH failures, macOS permission issues, hook ordering issues, etc. The headaches took a fair amount of time to not only troubleshoot but realize they were getting in the way.
The article covers how each tool works, how they compose, measured results from a month of usage, and every gotcha I ran into.
I also built a /token-savings setup skill that detects what's installed, walks through the rough edges, and includes a live TUI dashboard to verify everything is wired correctly.
If you hit something I missed, please let me know! I intend to keep updating this article as I find more tooling that can live in the background as seamlessly as these tools, as well as additional troubleshooting cases as they come up with current or new versions of headroom or rtk.