v1.6.1 — four languages reduce, and the dials that did nothing are gone

Four languages reduce instead of three, and four Gateway defects that reached provider traffic are fixed. This release closes Lane A of oxaudit.md and all of Lane B except two items held open for a decision.

The one thing that can break a script

--trace-output is now Unknown argument, and explain is rejected rather than ignored from --mode, TOKENDAMPER_APP_MODE and the config file. Nothing that took effect stops taking effect — neither dial was ever read by anything — but a wrapper passing --trace-output stderr will now exit non-zero. A config file still carrying a traceOutput key keeps loading, and the trace itself has not moved: stderr, as always.

Numbered as a patch, but the output moved

Two changes here alter what the same command emits for the same input — Go now elides, and debtScore reports a measurement rather than a constant pinned at its clamp. Pin exactly if your tooling depends on byte-stable output or parses debtScore out of the trace.

What ships

§62	--trace-output / TOKENDAMPER_TRACE_OUTPUT withdrawn; explain rejected from --mode / TOKENDAMPER_APP_MODE / the config file. Both were parsed, validated and frozen onto ResolvedConfig — and read by nothing.
§59–§61	Go elides. 27.46% on application Go, 19.42% on the stdlib at target 0.3, against this repo's TypeScript at 21.22%. The 287-file main corpus is 574/574 byte-identical, because every Go path is gated on the language. _test.go is where most of the saving is: 26.88% against 14.42% for source.
§64	debtScore read exactly 35.00 on 317 of 317 rows carrying debt — the clamp ceiling — whether the file lost 4.7% or 66.8%. It now tracks the measured byte cut with correlation 1.0000, and all 578 rows stay byte-identical.
§65	One content: null message no longer zeroes a whole request's Gateway saving. The standard OpenAI tool-call shape produced a search string of "null" with quotes, missed, and discarded every other message's replacement — 8,685 bytes sent, 8,685 forwarded. Array content failed identically, which is why the fix is a structural span scan.
§66	The Gateway no longer truncates streaming responses after 30 seconds. A fetch signal keeps governing the response body stream after the promise resolves, so "stream": true answers died mid-generation — on precisely the traffic the Gateway intercepts by default. The budget is now time-to-first-byte.
§67	Within-payload deduplication works on the first turn. It was gated on the block also having been seen in a previous turn, a condition doing no safety work.
§68	Pricing a candidate region no longer registers it with the block store — 12 blocks registered against 5 emitted on a 12-region file.
§58	--keep-docstrings keeps a Python function's docstring when its body is elided. Off by default; measured at 14.2%–21.1% of the saving. Plus a CLI warning when the knapsack drops whole files to meet the budget.
§63, §69	The float pool and the OX LOW table, each closed against its own list — including the rows that were not fixed, recorded with the reason.

Also in this release

Nine post-v1.6.0 changelog entries had been written into the already-released ## [v1.6.0] section instead of [Unreleased]. Found by diffing that section against the v1.6.0 tag; it is now byte-identical to what v1.6.0 actually shipped, and those entries appear under the release that contains them.

Verification

npm run typecheck, npm run lint, npm run build clean; 91 files / 826 tests passing. The built artifact reports 1.6.1 three ways: dist/src/version.js, package.json, and MCP serverInfo.version.

Full changelog: https://github.com/Epichlo/TokenDamper/blob/v1.6.1/CHANGELOG.md