The tree was copied into 11 files, so every future correction to it meant
11 edits in 7 languages. It now lives only in savings-explained.md, which
each of those pages already links to.
The surrounding prose stays: it carries the dilution point in the reader's
own language, which is the part that matters at a glance. Three pages
introduced the diagram with a trailing colon, reflowed into the following
paragraph. TRACKING.md gained the link it was missing.
The arrow diagram read as a pipeline where bash output becomes input tokens
which become cost. The real relationship is containment: bash output is
part of input tokens, and input tokens are part of cost alongside output
tokens.
Replace the arrow chain with a tree in all 12 places it appeared, including
the six translated READMEs:
Cost
├─ Input tokens
│ ├─ Bash output <- the only part RTK filters
│ ├─ Your prompt
│ ├─ System prompt
│ └─ Conversation history
└─ Output tokens <- what the model writes
This also makes the dilution self-evident: RTK shrinks one leaf, so the
effect on the root is bounded by that leaf's share.
The documented release blocker was ">=60% savings", but the code never
enforced that. 23 of the 63 threshold assertions in src/ already sit below
60% (15, 20, 30, 40 and 50% appear across aws, gh, git, glab and mvn), so
the gate was aspirational rather than real.
Set the floor to 20%, pointing at the existing "Correctness VS Token
Savings" section for the reasoning rather than restating it: a modest, safe
reduction beats an aggressive one that drops information the agent needed.
Descriptive "60-90%" ranges are left alone where they report what filters
actually achieve. Only requirement statements moved to the 20% floor.
Also reduce links to savings-explained.md down to one per file, and only
from root docs and user-facing pages. Removed from docs/contributing/ and
.claude/rules/, where the surrounding text already carries the caveat.
RTK was documented as delivering "60-90% token savings", which reads as a
cost reduction. What RTK actually reduces is bash output bytes. Those are
one contributor to input tokens, which are themselves only part of a bill
that also counts output tokens, so the reduction dilutes at every step.
- add docs/guide/resources/savings-explained.md as the canonical explainer:
the savings chain, both estimators, and what RTK does not reduce
- rescope the headline claim across README (7 languages), the guide, hook
rules, agent definitions and module READMEs
- relabel per-command tables as bash output reduction, keeping every figure
- document that reported tokens are estimates: rtk gain uses bytes/4
(src/core/tracking.rs), filter tests use split_whitespace().count().
Neither is a real tokenizer, so ratios hold but absolute counts do not
Remove figures that had no source: the $3/Mtok constant and its $36
example, the +/-10% tokenization accuracy claim, the 99.5% hook-install
figure, the invented session tables in README and INSTALL, and the 30-50%
parser range.
CHANGELOG is untouched. Shipped release notes stay as a historical record.
Adrien Eppling