Cut noisy tool output with ctx sift

ctx sift cuts noisy tool output before it reaches your coding agent. It leaves the original commands untouched and spends fewer tokens on repeated paths, logs, and formatting while keeping useful details visible.

Ordinary compaction runs locally. If you enable original retention, ctx recall can recover the complete captured output. The optional Jev selector is off by default and sends eligible passages to an external service only when you enable it.

Try it

Run commands through Sift:

ctx sift -- git status
ctx sift -- cargo test

To have a supported agent use Sift automatically, run ctx integrations install sift --agent claude-code. You can also sift a saved result:

ctx sift build.log

Short output, live progress, and binary data pass through. When compaction doesn't save tokens, the original output wins.

Why Sift instead of RTK

ctx favors broad, conservative compaction over a large collection of command-specific summaries. That gives it consistent behavior on arbitrary tool output and makes generic compaction reversible. It also has automatic agent setup, local savings reports, optional original-output recovery, and a one-command migration for recognized RTK integrations.

In the v0.4.0 release benchmark, ctx was faster than RTK 0.49 on all ten of our sample workloads and stayed within 1.35 ms of running the command directly. Across workloads collected from our own real usage, ctx reduced tool call output by 43%.

See how compaction and agent hooks work for the available views, recovery limits, and setup options.