Idea: Combining Caveman's prompt compression with a local FinOps proxy (hard budget caps & input savings)

[ashp15205]

Hey everyone! 👋

Caveman's approach to trimming conversational fluff and pleasantries at the prompt level is brilliant—it tackles one of the biggest hidden costs when running agents like Claude Code.

I’ve been working on the other half of this token-bloat problem on the network/proxy side with Guardian-Runtime.

While Caveman optimizes output tokens by enforcing ultra-concise style, Guardian sits as a zero-cloud reverse proxy on localhost:8080 to solve the input and runaway cost side:

1. Input Token Compression: Strips boilerplate, comment bloat, and whitespace from large file payloads before sending them over the wire (~40–70% savings).
2. Hard FinOps Circuit-Breaker: Enforces strict daily dollar caps (e.g. $10/day) to kill unbounded agent retry loops before they burn hundreds in API credits.
3. Local Secret Vaulting: Intercepts uncommitted .env keys and AWS credentials in RAM before they leave your machine, restoring them locally so generated code never breaks.

Pairing Caveman's output conciseness with transport-layer budget caps and input compression feels like the ultimate combo for running autonomous coding agents safely and affordably.

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/ashp15205/guardian-runtime

Has anyone here experimented with combining prompt-level brevity with network-layer budget caps? Would love to hear thoughts from the community! 🚀