Tilth
I spent tokens so my agents would stop wasting them (~4k Rust)
Details
- External ID
- 46952321
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Tilth
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5316711590296496
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing.Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence.So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not shit). It's ~3,900 lines of Rust. I'm positive HN will let me know if its shit after all.The idea: give agents code-aware reads with a token budget. Read a large file and you get a tree-sitter outline (function signatures, types, imports) instead of the raw text. Drill into specific line ranges when you need detail. Search for a symbol and definitions come first (via AST), ranked by proximity to what you're editing. read — structural outline for large files, full content for small ones, line ranges to drill in search — symbol (tree-sitter AST), literal text, or regex. Definitions before usages. map — codebase overview in one call files — glob matching with token estimates, respects .gitignore session — tracks what the agent has looked at Tree-sitter adds structural awareness for 10 languages on top. Uses ripgrep internals for search, memmap for large files. Runs as a CLI or MCP server over stdio. Single binary, no indexing, no cloud. MIT licensed.To try it: cargo install tilth tilth map . tilth search "your_function_name" . tilth read src/main.rs tilth install claude-code I hope it helps other people who, like me, would rather spend their tokens building things than watching an agent navigate.-- *tilth* — the state of soil that's been prepared for planting. Good tilth means structured ground where things can take root.GitHub: https://github.com/jahala/tilth
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent frameworks and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- token optimization for ai agents
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a compact CLI tool (~4k lines of Rust) designed to prune and optimize context and token usage for AI coding agents. A solo builder can easily vibe-code this kind of command-line token optimizer using standard file parsing and LLM orchestration patterns.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 128 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #66 of 129 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 82 days after the earliest competitor.
- Rust-split · hn · 2026-09-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Semble · hn · 2026-05-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Semble · hn · 2026-05-17 · 445 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- CodeRLM · hn · 2026-02-11 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Ctx, save tokens by loading only the relevant tools · hn · 2026-06-16 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Unify memory across agents and improve context rot, written in Rust · hn · 2026-04-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I nerfed our coding agents on purpose · hn · 2026-06-05 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.