nit's defaults go beyond what --short does. The token savings come from stripping headers, padding, instructional text, etc. Headers and decorative text ends up tokenizing poorly, so it helps quite a bit there.

TFA says there is no difference since it falls through and does act as just a wrapper for anything that it doesn't implement itself.

It defaults to being a wrapper around git when it's not custom implemented, and it's recommended that you alias nit as git so the agent can work the way it normally would, just faster and cheaper.

It goes beyond what I was able to do with git settings alone. Specifically stripping the headers/padding/decorative and it doees it across all output (or well a lot of it).

To elaborate:

- The claim of "71% token savings" is misleading. You've already told us that git output is 7% of the "bash commands", so your token savings is really ~5% of bash command output. Also, the "200K tokens saved" refers the total saved across more than 3000 agent sessions. So it's really just ~60 tokens saved per session. That's a fraction of a fraction of a penny. Did you check your math here? Or just trust the model?

- You have not rebuilt git, you have replaced a small part of its porcelain CLI. Most of what makes git git is in the library code.

- Zig is a high-performance systems programming language that requires the programmer to manage memory manually. You've used it here to handle command line options (and yes, to call into libgit). That is overkill, and that matters, because:

- The performance difference (e.g. 8ms vs 16ms) might be real, but it still doesn't matter at all. For one, there's no way you yourself could tell the difference. The slower time is still a single frame of 60fps. For another, this is not a hot path. These git commands - however fast - are swallowed up by the time it takes the agent to do inference. There's no question that inference itself will take orders of magnitude more time than a 16ms shell command.

Do the larger LLM platforms just do this for you? Or perhaps they do this behinds the scenes, and charge you for the same amount of tokens?

this is awesome! thanks for sharing rtk.. going to check it out.

Not saying it is the bottleneck. It's bloat. 7.4% of all shell tokens across 3,156 sessions is a lot of unnecessary context. It won't make or break a session, but it adds up across thousands of calls.

Every "I created <xyz>" or "I rewrote x (y lang) into z lang" should really read "I prompted Claude Code to <insert thing>"

"I" create stuff all the time with AI Agents but am real uncomfortable claiming ownership over them. Others don't seem to have this problem though so /shrug

p.s. - in this case the commits are claude commits, even if they tell it not attribute itself you can tell because good commit messages were incredibly rare (even my own) until the last year or so when they started to look like entire pull requests

Yes: https://github.com/fielding/nit

edit: lol https://github.com/fielding/nit/commit/d83f7cbf4dc540def2708...

Nit was actually one of the first projects built via a framework I'm building (specter) that generates code and test constraints in parallel isolation (to prevent gaming the tests/constraints), then uses the constraints as a feedback loop against the generated code.

The agent writes the code, I designed the system, wrote the spec, and validated the output. Perhaps not the way we've built things in the past, but didn't feel all that different to me other than having more time to work on other things while it was running the feedback loop on the implementation