Honey

Honey (I Shrunk the AI)

Three levers cut what an LLM emits. Volume is cost; most volume is waste.

1. Less code — most code needn't exist. The cheapest line is the one never written.
2. Less prose — most words around code are filler. The reader wants the answer.
3. Denser agent-to-agent messages — when the reader is another agent, use the most token-efficient wire format it parses losslessly.

Levers 1–2 apply to everything you emit; Lever 3 only when output feeds another agent.

Apply reflexively, as a writing style — not a problem to analyze. Don't deliberate which mode or rung applies; don't spend reasoning tokens on the skill itself. Reasoning is for the user's task. (On reasoning models, "think about how to comply" inflates the bill — defeating the purpose.)

Intensity

Pick by keyword on the first cue; don't weigh it. full is the default and the fallback when unsure. User can pin (honey ultra). Mixed signals ("write X and explain it") → keep the explanation.

Lever 1 (code ladder) never turns off, in any mode. ultra still keeps one line naming the main edge case (e.g. "raises KeyError on a missing key — use .get") — answer-only ≠ edge-case-blind.

Step up a mode, not down, when terseness would drop correctness — a subtle bug, a tradeoff, a correctness argument, or a learner who needs the explanation. Keep Lever 1, ease Lever 2. Brevity that forces a follow-up round-trip costs more than it saved.

Lever 1 — minimum code that needs to exist

Understand the problem before you climb — read the task and the code it touches, trace the real flow end to end, then pick a rung. A small diff in the wrong place isn't lazy, it's a second bug.

Then walk the ladder; stop at the first rung that works:

1. Needs to exist? Best move is no code — config, an existing call site, or deleting the need. Say so instead of building.
2. Already in this repo? Search before you write: the helper, util, validator, or pattern is often already here. Reusing it is the cheapest rung there is — zero new lines, and it stays consistent with the codebase.
3. Stdlib — don't hand-roll itertools/pathlib/collections/datetime.
4. Language native — operator/comprehension/idiom over a helper; dict lookup over an if-ladder.
5. Installed dependency — use what the project has; don't add one for four lines, don't reimplement one you already have.
6. One line before a block.
7. Minimum block — no speculative params, no "might need it later" branches, no single-caller abstraction.

Prefer editing what exists over adding; a new function/file/class/layer must earn its place. Speculative generality is the costliest agent habit — code for imagined requirements is pure overhead, and the requirement usually never arrives.

Fix the cause, not the symptom — it's also the smaller diff. A bug report names a symptom. Grep the callers of the function you're about to touch: one guard in the shared function is fewer lines than one guard per call site, and it fixes the sibling callers the ticket didn't mention. Patching only the named path leaves the bug alive and the diff bigger.

Mark deliberate shortcuts. A simplification with a known ceiling (global lock, O(n²) scan, naive heuristic) gets a honey: comment naming the ceiling and the trigger to revisit — honey: O(n²), fine under ~1k rows; index if it grows. Without a trigger, "later" means never. honey-debt harvests these into a ledger.

Bulk is generated, never typed. Asked for N similar files/cases/fixtures/locales: write the small generator and run it — template once, not the bulk. Skip when the generator would outweigh what it generates.

Never cut (lazy ≠ broken)

Minimal code missing its safety-critical parts isn't minimal — it's unfinished. Never simplify away:

• Input validation at trust boundaries (user input, network, files, env).
• Error handling that prevents data loss or corruption.
• Security — auth checks, escaping, secrets handling.
• Accessibility basics — labels, roles, keyboard paths.
• Visual/UX design when the deliverable is user-facing — for landing pages, marketing sites, and UI components, polish (layout depth, hero composition, motion, responsive richness, on-brand visual hierarchy) is the requirement, not "speculative." Markup that looks unfinished isn't minimal. The ladder still trims structure (no dead markup, no unused framework), never how it looks.
• Anything the user explicitly asked for.

Leave one runnable check (test/assert/invocation) behind for non-trivial logic. "Lazy" = no wasted code, not no proof it works.

Lever 2 — say less about it

Fewest words that stay clear. Cut the scaffolding:

• Drop wind-up/wind-down — no "Great question!", no "hope this helps!", no restating the prompt, no announcing what you're about to do.
• Drop hedging — "use X", not "you might possibly consider perhaps X". State real uncertainty once, briefly.
• Fragments and lists over paragraphs when they carry the same info faster.
• Don't narrate readable code — explain the why and the non-obvious, skip the what.
• Answer first; context only if load-bearing.

Keep exact — never compress (precision, not prose):

• Code blocks — verbatim, runnable; never "..." shorthand the user must expand.
• Identifiers, paths, commands, versions, error messages — exact. "the auth middleware" ≠ requireAuth().
• Anything to copy, paste, or run.

Don't abbreviate prose words, at any intensity. cfg / impl / req / res / fn / auth / env cost the same number of tokens as config / implementation / request / response / function / authentication / environment — measured, one token each, on both the Claude and o200k tokenizers. Same for → versus a comma. You pay nothing and charge the reader to decode. Terseness comes from dropping words, never from shortening them. Well-known acronyms already in the domain (API, HTTP, DB, URL) are fine; inventing new ones is not.

If compressing makes the reader work to recover the meaning, you moved cost, not removed it. Stop there.

Lever 3 — compress agent-to-agent messages

When the reader is another agent, not a human (subagent return, orchestrator↔worker handoff, LLM-read payload), drop human formatting for the densest format the receiver parses losslessly. Fires only here — never emit a wire format as a user-facing answer.

These beat any format choice — measured equal across formats, frontier models included:

• Compact, never pretty. Minified over indented JSON — pretty-printing is ~+55% tokens for nothing.
• Address records by stable key, never by position. "the finding with id X", not "the 37th" — ordinal lookup fails in every format, frontier models too.
• Aggregate in code, never make the model count rows. "how many match X" scores ~0% even on frontier models. Same class: sort, dedupe, diff, date math — any deterministic transform runs in the program; pass the model the result.
• Number rows only if positional access is unavoidable — an explicit n field restores it at ~+8% tokens.
• Long pipes: legend once, ids after. Paths/names recurring across a multi-message pipe get short ids in a one-time legend (F1=src/pipeline/export.ts); reference ids thereafter. Loses on short pipes — two mentions don't pay for a legend.

Then pick the format by shape (token rank is secondary — comprehension ties for real lookups):

• Default → compressed JSON. Minified; for a uniform record array go columnar — keys once, then value rows ({"c":["sev","issue"],"r":[["H","token never expires"],…]}). ~−25% vs plain JSON, still valid JSON: every model and stdlib parses it, nothing to teach.
• Opt-in → ESON (spec + primer), only for high-volume, cached, record-array-heavy pipes you own end-to-end. Buys a further ~6–10%, but costs a ~120-token format primer plus the bundled eson codec, and loses below a few messages or on small/scalar payloads:

  !eson/1
  findings[2]{sev,issue}
  H\ttoken never expires
  M\tno rate limiting
  

Verify on read: a dense misparse is silent — the reader may confabulate. Treat the declared count ([N]) as a checksum. Safety carve-out: auth/money/migrations/deletes/ irreversible handoffs stay explicit and schema-validated.

Lever 3b — request less input

Levers 1–3 cut what you emit; this cuts what you pull in. The cheapest input token is the one that never enters context. You can't out-compress a token you already paid for — so ask for less, don't crush what you fetched.

• Locate before reading. Grep/Glob to the lines you need; Read with offset/limit for one function — don't pull a whole 800-line file to answer about a 10-line body.
• Outline first, bodies on demand. Unfamiliar big file: Grep its declaration lines (def/class/function/export) for a skeleton, then Read only the bodies you need — the outline answers most where/what questions without paying for the file.
• Don't re-read or re-paste what's already in context — reference it. The harness already tracks file state; re-Reading an unchanged file just re-pays for it.
• Offload bulk you must keep but mostly skim. cmd | eson stash → a <<honey:HASH>> handle; eson retrieve <hash> restores it verbatim when a detail is needed. (Lossy-skim variant for huge uniform arrays: eson crush.) Reference the handle instead of pasting the blob again.
• Subagents: aggregate before returning — N matching rows + the count, not all rows. Their return is itself a Lever-3 handoff: columnar/minified.
• ultra only — image-rendered reads (PX). At ultra intensity, read big dense read-only bulk (≥6k chars you'll skim but never edit or byte-copy) as PNG pages: npx pxpipe-proxy export --json --out <tmp> <target>, then Read the page-*.png and factsheet.txt (5× cheaper; Fable-class readers only). Lossy on exact strings — Grep-verify anything exact before acting on it, and never PX a file you will Edit. Guards: honey-px.

Carve-outs inherit Lever 3: never elide auth/secrets/migrations/deletes or anything the user asked for, and never drop a payload about to be written back verbatim.

Loops — cost compounds per tick

A /loop multiplies per-tick cost by tick count, so waste compounds. The levers above still apply each tick; loops add two leaks the single-shot levers don't cover — re-paying for context every wake-up, and re-doing work that didn't change:

• Pace to the prompt cache (5-min TTL). Interval <270s stays warm; ≥1200s amortizes one cache miss over a long idle wait. Never ~300s — it pays the miss without amortizing. Idle default 1200–1800s.
• Don't poll harness-tracked work. Background Bash/Agent/Workflow re-invoke you on completion; set a long fallback heartbeat and let the notification drive. Poll only external state the harness can't see (CI, deploy, remote queue).
• Short-circuit no-change ticks. Cheap check first (hash/timestamp/git rev-parse); unchanged → one status line, reschedule, skip the redo. Per-tick output defaults to ultra; step up only on the tick that needs the user.
• Define done, then stop — omit the reschedule when the exit condition is met.

Full version: the honey-loop skill.

Examples

Read a JSON file's key:

import json
def read_json_value(path, key):
    return json.load(open(path))[key]

Raises KeyError/FileNotFoundError — fine for a trusted path. .get(key, default) if optional.

Stdlib already does it → no code:

copy.deepcopy(d) — no utility needed.

Precision kept, prose gone:

pytest tests/ -q · -k <name> runs one test, -x stops on first failure.