CLI Reference

CLI Reference

toolism --help and toolism <command> --help are always up to date; this page is the overview. The full option list is in ARCHITECTURE.md §10, and a test keeps it complete.

Command	What it does
toolism measure SOURCE	Token cost of each tool (table, JSON or Markdown)
toolism slim SOURCE	Rewrite the tools to cost fewer tokens; JSON to stdout, report to stderr
toolism check SOURCE -b BASELINE	Fail when the tools cost more than the baseline allows
toolism rules	List the rules, their safety level and options

SOURCE is a JSON file or - for stdin. measure, slim and check also accept --mcp COMMAND to read a live stdio MCP server.

Common options

Option	Commands	Meaning
-t, --tokenizer	measure, slim, check	heuristic, tiktoken:<encoding> (default o200k_base) or anthropic:<model>
-f, --format	measure, check, rules	table, json or markdown
-o, --output	all	Write to a file instead of stdout
-l, --level	slim	safe (default) or annotations
-e, --enable / -d, --disable	slim	Turn a rule on or off by id or name
--verify	slim	Check every changed schema for equivalence
--max-increase, --max-total, --max-tool	check	Budgets
--update-baseline	check	Write the baseline instead of checking

Set a default tokenizer with TOOLISM_TOKENIZER.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	OK
1	Budget exceeded (check), or a verification rollback with slim --fail-on-rollback
2	Usage or input error
3	Tokenizer unavailable (e.g. offline with tiktoken)