Laconic – Compress what a coding agent carries, not what it says.

Status: early package release. laconic 0.2.0 ships the handle ledger and the file observation encoder — the largest single lever, replacing whole-file reads with a structural outline plus the requested span. Command, search, and action encoding are not yet implemented.

Most of what fills a coding agent's context window is never read by a human — file contents, command output, patches, search hits — and it is re-ingested on every turn of a session. Laconic is a codec for that traffic: it re-encodes observations and actions at the tool boundary, keeps every elision recoverable, and renders prose for a human only on demand.

Install

uv tool install laconic
laconic --help

Documentation

Document	What's in it
docs/pitch.md	The short version: the problem, the measurement, what is and isn't claimed
docs/overview.md	What Laconic is, why, the evidence, prior work, and the pre-registered gates
docs/system-design.md	Architecture, components, data model, and the evaluation harness

Measurement

One tool is runnable today. It decomposes real agent session transcripts into observations, actions, prose, and prompts, weighted by model pricing — the analysis the design is built on:

python3 scripts/measure_session_composition.py

Run it against your own sessions before taking any number in docs/ on faith.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.