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Compress LLM context to save tokens and reduce costs

_{Real session stats: 3,003 compressions · 178,442 tokens saved · 24.7% avg reduction · up to 92% with dedup}

Install · How It Works · Supported Tools · Changelog · Discord

sqz compresses command output before it reaches your LLM. Single Rust binary, zero config.

The real win is dedup: when the same file gets read 5 times in a session, sqz sends it once and returns a 13-token reference for every repeat.

Without sqz:                    With sqz:

File read #1:  2,000 tokens     File read #1:  ~800 tokens (compressed)
File read #2:  2,000 tokens     File read #2:  ~13 tokens  (dedup ref)
File read #3:  2,000 tokens     File read #3:  ~13 tokens  (dedup ref)
───────────────────────         ───────────────────────
Total:         6,000 tokens     Total:         ~826 tokens (86% saved)

Token Savings

24.7% average reduction across 3,003 real compressions · 92% saved on repeated file reads · 86% on shell/git output · 13-token refs for cached content

One developer's week, measured from actual sqz gain output:

$ sqz gain
sqz token savings (last 7 days)
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  04-13 │                              │   2,329 saved
  04-14 │                              │       0 saved
  04-15 │███                           │  12,954 saved
  04-16 │██                            │   9,223 saved
  04-17 │████                          │  14,752 saved
  04-18 │██████████████████████████████│ 105,569 saved
  04-19 │████████                      │  30,882 saved
  04-20 │█                             │   4,334 saved
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Total: 3,003 compressions, 178,442 tokens saved (24.7% avg reduction)

Per-command compression

Single-command compression (measured via cargo test -p sqz-engine benchmarks):

Session-level with dedup

Where the real savings live — the cache sends each file once, repeats cost 13 tokens:

Single-command compression ranges from 2–58% depending on content. Repeated reads drop to 13 tokens each. Your mileage will vary with how repetitive your tool calls are — agentic sessions with many file re-reads see the biggest wins.

Install

Prebuilt binaries (no compiler required — works on every platform):

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ojuschugh1/sqz/main/install.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ojuschugh1/sqz/main/install.ps1 | iex

# Any platform via npm
npm install -g sqz-cli

# macOS / Linux via Homebrew
brew tap ojuschugh1/sqz
brew install sqz

Build from source via Cargo:

cargo install sqz-cli sqz-mcp

sqz-cli provides the sqz binary; sqz-mcp provides the MCP server. sqz-engine is a library dependency — it compiles automatically and does not need to be installed separately.

Build from source (cargo install sqz-cli) works too, but needs a C toolchain:

• Linux: build-essential (apt) or equivalent
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
• Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload. Without these, cargo install fails with linker link.exe not found. If you don't already have them, use the PowerShell or npm install above instead.

Then initialize:

sqz init --global     # hooks apply to every project on this machine
# or
sqz init              # hooks apply to just this project (.claude/settings.local.json)

--global writes to ~/.claude/settings.json (the user scope per the Anthropic scope table), so the sqz hook fires in every Claude Code session on this machine. This is the common case on first install. Your existing permissions, env, statusLine, and unrelated hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json are preserved — sqz merges its entries rather than overwriting.

Plain sqz init (project scope) is useful when you want sqz active only inside one repo.

Only using one agent? Pass --only (or --skip) to limit which configs are written:

sqz init --only opencode              # just OpenCode, nothing else
sqz init --only opencode,codex        # OpenCode and Codex
sqz init --skip cursor,windsurf       # everything except Cursor and Windsurf

Accepted names: claude, cursor, windsurf, cline, gemini, kiro, opencode, codex. Aliases (claude-code, gemini-cli, roo, kiro-cli) also work. --only and --skip can't be combined.

Manual installation (preserve comments in your config)

sqz init round-trips your config file through a JSON parser to merge the sqz entry, which drops any comments in your opencode.jsonc (and the analogous JSON-with-comments files other tools accept). If you've commented your config carefully and want to keep them, install by hand instead.

OpenCode — two steps:

1. Drop the plugin file in place. sqz prints the generated TS to stdout so you don't have to hand-write the path-escaping logic:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/opencode/plugins
   sqz print-opencode-plugin > ~/.config/opencode/plugins/sqz.ts

2. Add the MCP entry to your existing opencode.jsonc yourself. Append this block inside the top-level mcp object (create the mcp object if it doesn't exist):

   "sqz": {
     "type": "local",
     "command": ["sqz-mcp", "--transport", "stdio"],
     "enabled": true
   }

Comments in the rest of your file stay put. OpenCode auto-discovers the plugin file; no plugin array entry needed (adding one causes double-loading, see issue #10).

Other tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Gemini CLI, and Codex use plain JSON configs without comment support, so the automated path is non-destructive there. Use sqz init --only <tool> for those.

That's it. Shell hooks installed, AI tool hooks configured.

How It Works

sqz installs a PreToolUse hook that intercepts bash commands before your AI tool runs them. The output gets compressed transparently — the AI tool never knows.

Claude → git status → [sqz hook rewrites] → compressed output (85% smaller)

What gets compressed:

• Shell output — git, cargo, npm, docker, kubectl, ls, grep, etc.
• JSON — strips nulls, compact encoding
• Logs — collapses repeated lines
• Test output — shows failures only

What doesn't get compressed:

• Stack traces, error messages, secrets — routed to safe mode (0% compression)
• Your prompts and the AI's responses — controlled by the AI tool, not sqz

Supported Tools

CLI

sqz init --global             # Install hooks for every project on this machine
sqz init                      # Install hooks for just this project
sqz init --only kiro          # Only configure Kiro (skip the rest)
sqz init --only opencode      # Only configure OpenCode (skip the rest)
sqz init --skip cursor        # Configure every agent except Cursor
sqz compress <text>           # Compress (or pipe from stdin)
sqz compress --no-cache       # Compress without dedup (always full output)
sqz expand <ref>              # Recover original content from a §ref:HASH§ token
sqz compact                   # Evict stale context to free tokens
sqz gain                      # Show daily token savings (bar chart)
sqz gain --project .          # Per-project daily gains
sqz gain --days 30            # Last 30 days
sqz stats                     # Cumulative compression report
sqz stats --breakdown         # Per-command token usage breakdown
sqz stats --project .         # Stats for current project only
sqz stats --project list      # List all tracked projects
sqz discover                  # Find missed savings
sqz resume                    # Re-inject session context after compaction
sqz vizit                     # Live terminal dashboard (like htop for AI agents)
sqz hook claude               # Process a PreToolUse hook (Claude Code)
sqz hook kiro                 # Process a PreToolUse hook (Kiro)
sqz print-opencode-plugin     # Print OpenCode plugin TS for manual install
sqz proxy --port 8080         # API proxy (compresses full request payloads)

Dedup Escape Hatch

When sqz sees the same content twice, it returns a compact §ref:HASH§ token instead of the full text. Most models handle this fine, but some (e.g., GLM 5.1) can't parse the ref format and loop. Four ways to work around this:

# 1. Recover original content from a ref
sqz expand a1b2c3d4              # prefix match
sqz expand '§ref:a1b2c3d4§'     # paste the whole token

# 2. Compress without dedup (per-invocation)
echo "..." | sqz compress --no-cache

# 3. Disable dedup globally (env var)
export SQZ_NO_DEDUP=1

# 4. MCP passthrough tool (returns input byte-exact, zero transforms)
# Available via tools/list when sqz-mcp is running

Track Your Own Savings

Run sqz gain in your shell any time to see your own daily breakdown (see the Token Savings section above for what the output looks like), and sqz stats for the full cumulative report:

$ sqz stats
  📊 sqz compression stats
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────

  178,442  tokens saved
  ↓  24.7% average reduction

  Compressions           3,003
  Tokens in              721,840
  Tokens out             543,398
  Tokens saved           178,442
  Avg reduction          24.7%

  🗄️  Cache
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Entries                43
  Size                   39.1 KB

Add --breakdown to see exactly which commands consume the most tokens:

$ sqz stats --breakdown

  🔍 Top Token Consumers
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  command               calls  tokens in        out    saved
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  dedup                   249      45541       3237      93%
  stdin                    51      30851      24289      21%
  auto                    132      18288       7740      58%
  echo                     17       1050        558      47%
  ls -la                    8        948        948       0%
  cargo build               7        170        145      15%
  git status                4         56          8      86%
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Per-project filtering:

sqz stats --project .           # stats for current project only
sqz stats --project list        # list all tracked projects
sqz gain --project .            # daily gains for current project
sqz gain --days 30              # last 30 days instead of 7
sqz gain --days 30 --project .  # combine both

Stats are stored locally in SQLite under ~/.sqz/sessions.db — nothing leaves your machine.

How Compression Works

1. Per-command formatters — git status → compact summary, cargo test → failures only, docker ps → name/image/status table
2. Structural summaries — code files compressed to imports + function signatures + call graph (~70% reduction). The model sees the architecture, not implementation noise.
3. Dedup cache — SHA-256 content hash, persistent across sessions. Second read = 13-token reference.
4. JSON pipeline — strip nulls → project out debug fields → flatten → collapse arrays → TOON encoding (lossless compact format)
5. Safe mode — stack traces, secrets, migrations detected by entropy analysis and routed through with 0% compression

For the full technical details, see docs/.

Configuration

# ~/.sqz/presets/default.toml
[preset]
name = "default"
version = "1.0"

[compression.condense]
enabled = true
max_repeated_lines = 3

[compression.strip_nulls]
enabled = true

[budget]
warning_threshold = 0.70
default_window_size = 200000

Privacy

• Zero telemetry — no data transmitted, no crash reports
• Fully offline — works in air-gapped environments
• All processing local

Development

git clone https://github.com/ojuschugh1/sqz.git
cd sqz
cargo test --workspace
cargo build --release

License

Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2) — use, fork, modify freely. Two restrictions: no competing hosted service, no removing license notices.

Links

• Benchmark: sqz vs rtk
• Discord
• Changelog

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