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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.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.