Technique 05 / 14 · Noise reduction
Bash output trimmer
Stop installs, builds and container pulls from flooding the context with lines nobody reads.
Interactive model
See the change.
Compare a verbose cargo build log with a concise summary of the result and warnings.
cargo build
✓ build finished in 32.4s · 214 crates compiled · 2 warnings: filter.rs:214, tree.rs:87
Conceptual demonstration. Counts illustrate the flow, not measured production savings.
How it works
Less context. Same thread of work.
A successful command can print thousands of lines that are irrelevant to the next decision. DistilCode routes common dev commands through Token Killer (rtk), which filters their output: grouping, deduplication, failures-only test summaries. Errors, warnings and the closing summary survive; download progress and repeated lines collapse.
If a command has no filtered equivalent, it runs untouched and the output ceiling is the backstop: oversized output becomes a bounded preview, and the complete result is saved so the agent can Grep or read a range of it instead of ingesting it all.
In practice
The operating loop
- 01
Rewrite the command
Known commands run through rtk, which prints a filtered version of the same output.
- 02
Keep what matters
Errors, warnings and summary lines stay; progress bars and repeats collapse.
- 03
Bound the rest
Anything still oversized is capped by lines and bytes, with the full output saved for targeted reads.