60–95% fewer tokens in your agent loops, same answers. Meet Headroom.

AI coding agents are expensive — not because models cost too much per token, but because they send too many of them. An SRE debugging session with a raw agent: 65,694 tokens in. With Headroom in the middle: 5,118. Same bug found. Headroom is a new open-source context compression layer that intercepts everything your agent reads — tool outputs, log dumps, RAG chunks, files, conversation history — and compresses it before the LLM ever sees it. It's local, reversible, and available as a drop-in proxy, a library, or an MCP server. The numbers that matter Savings on real agent workloads: Code search (100 results): 17,765 → 1,408 tokens (92% reduction) SRE incident debugging: 65,694 → 5,118 tokens (92%) GitHub issue triage: 54,174 → 14,761 tokens (73%) Codebase exploration: 78,502 → 41,254 tokens (47%) Accuracy on standard benchmarks (GSM8K, TruthfulQA, SQuAD v2, BFCL) is preserved — some scores actually improve slightly, likely because the model sees cleaner signal. What's doing the compression Under the hood, Headroom routes content through a stack of specialised compressors: SmartCrusher — JSON, nested objects, arrays of dicts CodeCompressor — AST-aware for Python, JS, Go, Rust, Java, C++ Kompress-base — a custom HuggingFace model trained on agentic traces, for prose and mixed content CacheAligner — stabilises prompt prefixes so Anthropic/OpenAI KV caches actually hit It also does CCR (reversible compression) — originals are cached locally and the LLM can retrieve them on demand if it needs them. Nothing is destroyed. Why the proxy mode matters The most interesting deployment path: headroom proxy --port 8787 , then point your existing tool at localhost. Zero code changes. Works with any language. Or even simpler: headroom wrap claude wraps Claude Code, routes its traffic through Headroom automatically. One command, savings start immediately. Same for Codex, Cursor, Aider, Copilot CLI. "Library — compress(messages) in Python or TypeScript, inline in any app. Proxy — hea