headroom

<div align="center"><pre> ██╗ ██╗███████╗ █████╗ ██████╗ ██████╗ ██████╗ ██████╗ ███╗ ███╗ ██║ ██║██╔════╝██╔══██╗██╔══██╗██╔══██╗██╔═══██╗██╔═══██╗████╗ ████║ ███████║█████╗ ███████║██║ ██║██████╔╝██║ ██║██║ ██║██╔████╔██║ ██╔══██║██╔══╝ ██╔══██║██║ ██║██╔══██╗██║ ██║██║ ██║██║╚██╔╝██║ ██║ ██║███████╗██║ ██║██████╔╝██║ ██║╚██████╔╝╚██████╔╝██║ ╚═╝ ██║ ╚═╝ ╚═╝╚══════╝╚═╝ ╚═╝╚═════╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═╝ ╚═╝ The context compression layer for AI agents </pre></div> <p align="center"><strong>60–95% fewer tokens (for JSON data), 15-20% fewer tokens (for coding agents) · library · proxy · MCP · content-aware compressors · local-first · reversible</strong></p> <p align="center"> <a href="https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom/actions/workflows/ci.yml"><img src="https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg" alt="CI"></a> <a href="https://app.codecov.io/gh/chopratejas/headroom"><img src="https://codecov.io/gh/chopratejas/headroom/graph/badge.svg" alt="codecov"></a> <a href="https://pypi.org/project/headroom-ai/"><img src="https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/headroom-ai.svg" alt="PyPI"></a> <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/headroom-ai"><img src="https://img.shields.io/npm/v/headroom-ai.svg" alt="npm"></a> <a href="https://huggingface.co/chopratejas/kompress-v2-base"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/model-Kompress--v2--base-yellow.svg" alt="Model: Kompress-v2-base"></a> <a href="LICENSE"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/license-Apache%202.0-blue.svg" alt="License: Apache 2.0"></a> <a href="https://headroom-docs.vercel.app/docs"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/docs-online-blue.svg" alt="Docs"></a> </p> <!-- mcp-name: io.github.headroomlabs-ai/headroom --> <p align="center"> <a href="https://headroom-docs.vercel.app/docs">Docs</a> · <a href="#get-started-60-seconds">Install</a> · <a href="#proof">Proof</a> · <a href="#agent-compatibility-matrix">Agents</a> · <a href="https://discord.gg/yRmaUNpsPJ">Discord</a> · <a href="llms.txt">llms.txt</a> </p> <p align="center">_{<b>AI agents / LLMs:</b> read <a href="llms.txt"><code>/llms.txt</code></a> here, or fetch <a href="https://headroom-docs.vercel.app/llms.txt">the live index</a> / <a href="https://headroom-docs.vercel.app/llms-full.txt">full docs blob</a>.}</p>

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<p align="center"><a href="https://trendshift.io/repositories/20881" target="_blank"><img src="https://trendshift.io/api/badge/repositories/20881" alt="chopratejas%2Fheadroom | Trendshift" style="width: 250px; height: 55px;" width="250" height="55"/></a></p>

Headroom compresses everything your AI agent reads — tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, files, and conversation history — before it reaches the LLM. Same answers, fraction of the tokens.

<p align="center"> <img src="HeadroomDemo-Fast.gif" alt="Headroom in action" width="820"> <br/>_{Live: 10,144 → 1,260 tokens — same FATAL found.} </p>

What it does

• Library — compress(messages) in Python or TypeScript, inline in any app
• Proxy — headroom proxy --port 8787, zero code changes, any language
• Agent wrap — headroom wrap claude|codex|grok|copilot|cursor|aider|opencode|cline|continue|goose|openhands|openclaw|vibe|omp|zcode in one command; undo with headroom unwrap <tool>
• MCP server — headroom_compress, headroom_retrieve, headroom_stats for any MCP client
• Cross-agent memory — shared store across Claude, Codex, Gemini, Grok, auto-dedup
• headroom learn — mines failed sessions, writes corrections to CLAUDE.local.md (default, gitignored) or CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md / GROK.md
• Output token reduction — trims what the model writes back (not just what you send): drops ceremony/restated code and skips deep "thinking" on routine steps. See Output token reduction.
• Reversible (CCR) — originals are cached for retrieval on demand

How it works (30 seconds)

 Your agent / app
   (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, LangChain, Agno, Strands, your own code…)
        │   prompts · tool outputs · logs · RAG results · files
        ▼
    ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
    │  Headroom   (runs locally — your data stays here)  │
    │  ────────────────────────────────────────────────  │
    │  CacheAligner  →  ContentRouter  →  CCR            │
    │                    ├─ SmartCrusher   (JSON)        │
    │                    ├─ CodeCompressor (AST)         │
    │                    └─ Kompress-v2-base (text, HF)  │
    │                                                    │
    │  Cross-agent memory  ·  headroom learn  ·  MCP     │
    └────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
        │   compressed prompt  +  retrieval tool
        ▼
 LLM provider  (Anthropic · OpenAI · Bedrock · …)

• ContentRouter — detects content type, selects the right compressor
• SmartCrusher / CodeCompressor / Kompress-v2-base — compress JSON, AST, or prose
• CacheAligner - detects and warns about volatile content that can bust provider KV cache prefixes; never rewrites prompts
• CCR — stores originals locally; LLM calls headroom_retrieve if it needs them

→ Architecture · CCR reversible compression · Kompress-v2-base model card

Get started (60 seconds)

# 1 — Install
uv tool install --python 3.13 "headroom-ai[all]"  # CLI as a global tool in a self-contained virtual env
pip install "headroom-ai[all]"                    # Python — ships the `headroom` CLI
npm install headroom-ai                           # TypeScript SDK only — no `headroom` CLI

# 2 — Pick your mode  (the `headroom` commands below come from the uv or pip install)
headroom deploy                         # turnkey local deployment + agent config
headroom wrap claude                    # wrap a coding agent
headroom proxy --port 8787              # drop-in proxy, zero code changes
# or: from headroom import compress      # inline library

# 3 — Verify setup and see the savings
headroom doctor                         # health check — confirms routing is working
headroom perf
headroom dashboard                      # live savings dashboard (proxy must be running)

To use headroom, it is recommended you launch a wrapped agent session each time so that all necessary setup is completed. When wrapping a coding agent, headroom starts a local proxy, installs Serena for semantic code navigation, and launches a coding agent session configured to proxy requests through headroom.

Serena is registered at user scope (for Claude Code, in ~/.claude.json), so it stays available in your other projects until you run headroom unwrap. To skip it entirely, wrap with --code-memory none.

The headroom CLI ships only via the PyPI package. The npm headroom-ai is the TypeScript SDK — a library you import (import { compress } from 'headroom-ai'), not a CLI, so it provides no headroom command.

Granular extras: [proxy], [mcp], [ml], [code], [memory], [vector] (optional HNSW backend — needs a C++ toolchain, not in [all]), [relevance], [image], [agno], [langchain], [evals], [pytorch-mps] (Apple-GPU memory-embedder offload — set HEADROOM_EMBEDDER_RUNTIME=pytorch_mps). Requires Python 3.10+.

Codex / global install

If Codex or another MCP client cannot inherit a shell PATH reliably, install Headroom as a persistent uv tool and point the client at the absolute binary path:

uv tool install "headroom-ai[all]"
command -v headroom

Then use the returned path in MCP config:

[mcp_servers.headroom]
command = "/absolute/path/from/command-v/headroom"
args = ["mcp", "serve"]

command = "headroom" only works when the client starts with a PATH that already includes the uv tool directory.

Proof

Savings on real agent workloads:

| Workload | Before | After | Savings | |-------------------------------|-------:|-------:|--------:| | Code search (100 results) | 17,765 | 1,408 | 92% | | SRE incident debugging | 65,694 | 5,118 | 92% | | GitHub issue triage | 54,174 | 14,761 | 73% | | Codebase exploration | 78,502 | 41,254 | 47% |

Accuracy preserved on standard benchmarks:

| Benchmark | Category | N | Baseline | Headroom | Delta | |------------|----------|----:|---------:|---------:|------------| | GSM8K | Math | 100 | 0.870 | 0.870 | ±0.000 | | TruthfulQA | Factual | 100 | 0.530 | 0.560 | +0.030 | | SQuAD v2 | QA | 100 | — | 97% | 19% compression | | BFCL | Tools | 100 | — | 97% | 32% compression |

Reproduce: python -m headroom.evals suite --tier 1 · Full benchmarks & methodology

Output token reduction (cut what the model writes back)

Everything above shrinks the prompt you send. But you also pay for every token the model writes back — and on Opus-class models output costs 5× input. A lot of that output is waste: "Great, let me…" preambles, re-printing code you just showed it, and deep "thinking" on routine steps like reading a file.

Headroom can trim that too, from the proxy, without you changing any code:

• Verbosity steering — appends a short "be terse, don't restate context" note to the end of the system prompt (so your prompt cache still hits).
• Effort routing — when a turn is just the model resuming after a tool result (a file read, a passing test), it dials the model's thinking effort down. New questions and errors keep full effort.

Applies to Anthropic /v1/messages and OpenAI-compatible endpoints (/v1/chat/completions, /v1/responses). Effort routing uses reasoning_effort on OpenAI, thinking.budget_tokens / output_config.effort on Anthropic — same clamp-only invariant on both paths, same output_shaper:* label vocabulary.

Turn it on:

export HEADROOM_OUTPUT_SHAPER=1     # off by default
headroom proxy --port 8787

Already running a proxy? These switches are read live on every request, so a proxy that headroom wrap reused (rather than started) would not see a value you export afterwards — its environment was snapshotted at launch. headroom wrap now hot-syncs your current settings to the running proxy via a loopback POST /admin/runtime-env, so they take effect immediately with no restart (no cold start, no dropped requests, no lost caches). Set them before you wrap. On a shared proxy these overrides are global — the last explicit setting wins.

Learn the right terseness for you. People don't say how terse they want answers — they show it (they interrupt long replies, or move on before they could have read them). headroom learn --verbosity reads your past sessions and picks the level automatically:

headroom learn --verbosity            # preview what it found (dry run)
headroom learn --verbosity --apply    # save it; the proxy uses it from now on

See how many output tokens you saved. Output savings are counterfactual — we never see what the model would have written — so Headroom reports an honest estimate with a confidence range, never a made-up number:

headroom output-savings
# Reduction: 31.7%  (95% CI 27.7% … 35.7%)   [estimated]

Want a measured number instead of an estimate? Leave 10% of conversations unshaped as a control group: export HEADROOM_OUTPUT_HOLDOUT=0.1. The dashboard shows an Output Tokens Saved card next to input compression, labelled measured or estimated with the confidence band.

→ Full write-up incl. the measurement methodology: [Output token