RTK cuts the bash noise you get billed for
RTK is a Rust proxy that compresses bash output before a coding agent reads it, so those tokens never hit the bill.
RTK sits between a coding agent and the shell so you pay for less input. git status, cargo test, and ls get filtered, grouped, truncated, and deduped before they land in context. Failures stay. Two hundred passing tests become a count. That is how the token bill comes down: stop stuffing the window with command noise.
A hook rewrites Bash calls automatically, which is where most of the waste is. Native Read, Grep, and Glob still skip it, so the savings show up on the commands the agent actually shells out.