Tamp

Token compression proxy for coding agents. 52.6% fewer tokens, zero code changes. Works with Claude Code, Aider, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, 🦞 OpenClaw, and any OpenAI-compatible agent.

npx @sliday/tamp

Claude Code plugin

Auto-start on every session:

claude plugin marketplace add sliday/claude-plugins
claude plugin install tamp@sliday

Adds /tamp:status and /tamp:config commands.

🦞 OpenClaw

TAMP_STAGES=minify,toon,strip-lines,whitespace,dedup,diff,prune tamp -y

Set provider to http://localhost:7778 → done. Full guide: docs/openclaw-setup.md

How It Works

Claude Code ──► Tamp (localhost:7778) ──► Anthropic API
Aider/Cursor ──►          │          ──► OpenAI API
Gemini CLI ────►          │          ──► Google AI API

Auto-detects API format, compresses tool output, forwards upstream. Error results skipped. JSON minified, arrays encoded columnarly, text/code normalized or semantically compressed.

Compression Stages (all enabled by default):

Stage	What
minify	Strip JSON whitespace
toon	Columnar array encoding
strip-lines	Remove line-number prefixes
whitespace	Collapse blank lines
llmlingua	Neural text compression
dedup	Replace duplicates with refs
diff	Replace similar re-reads with diffs
prune	Remove low-value metadata

Opt-in lossy stages: strip-comments, textpress (LLM semantic compression)

Quick Start

# Option A: One-line installer
curl -fsSL https://tamp.dev/setup.sh | bash

# Option B: Manual
npx @sliday/tamp
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:7778

Use your agent as normal — Tamp compresses silently.

Configuration

Run tamp init to create ~/.config/tamp/config. All variables work via env or config file.

Variable	Default	Description
TAMP_PORT	7778	Listen port
TAMP_UPSTREAM	https://api.anthropic.com	Default upstream
TAMP_STAGES	(all default)	Comma-separated stages
TAMP_MIN_SIZE	200	Min content size (chars)
TAMP_LOG	true	Enable logging
TAMP_CACHE_SAFE	true	Compress newest only (prompt-cache safe)
TAMP_LLMLINGUA_URL	(none)	LLMLingua sidecar URL

Recommended setups:

# Default (all stages)
npx @sliday/tamp

# No Python (skip LLMLingua)
TAMP_STAGES=minify,toon,strip-lines,whitespace,dedup,diff,prune npx @sliday/tamp -y

# Re-compress history too
TAMP_CACHE_SAFE=false npx @sliday/tamp

Installation

# npx (no install)
npx @sliday/tamp

# npm global
npm install -g @sliday/tamp
tamp

# systemd service (Linux)
tamp install-service
tamp status

Token Savings

Claude Code sends full conversation history on every API call. Tool results accumulate — files, listings, outputs — all re-sent as input tokens.

With 52.6% average compression: Save $0.19–$0.32 per 200-request session (Sonnet/Opus 4.6). Max subscribers get 47% more requests from fixed budgets. See whitepaper PDF for full benchmarks.

Output savings: Tamp injects token-efficient rules into your CLAUDE.md, reducing output tokens by 66.2%. Inspired by drona23/claude-token-efficient.

Caveman Mode evaluation: Tested extreme compression (40-70% additional savings) but found unsafe for production. Recommended: task-type-aware compression (78% savings on safe tasks like env vars/typos/docs). Full evaluation: bench/caveman-mode-evaluation.md.

Development

npm test
node smoke.js

License

MIT © Stas Kulesh