Pattern: Token-Compression Middleware Is Becoming a Standard Layer in Agent Stacks

GitHub (multiple)·medium signal

rtk (shell output), headroom (tool/log/RAG output), and LeanCTX (read-gating) all insert a compression layer between the agent and its data, each claiming 60-95% token reductions. As the context window became the dominant cost and latency driver, builders are treating compression as install-once infrastructure — a proxy or hook — rather than hand-trimming prompts per task; expect this to standardize the way response caching did for web apps.