Claude Code is one of the best tools to show up in recent years for people who actually write software. It is not a chatbot with ambitions: it works in your environment, reads files, runs commands, and understands project context. It is different. It works.

The friction starts when you use it the way it was designed to be used: multiple sessions open, parallel projects, pipelines running. With three to six instances at once, token usage does not scale linearly. It explodes. And the weekly Claude Max cap that felt generous when you tried a single session shows up Thursday morning with a message nobody wants to see.

There are three open-source tools that address this problem at different layers. None of them is magic. Together, they make a real difference.

Headroom: 34% less context is 34% more work done

GitHub: chopratejas/headroom

Headroom is a proxy that sits between your client and Anthropic’s API and compresses context in flight. Roughly a 34% reduction in message size, without changing Claude’s behavior, without a weekend of configuration.

You install it and you are done. It runs transparently. Every request that goes through Headroom is smaller. In long sessions with accumulated context—the exact scenario for heavy Claude Code use—that gain is consistent and compounds.

It is the kind of tool that makes you ask: “Why isn’t this the default?”

RTK: Claude does not need 4,000 lines of log to know something failed

GitHub: rtk-ai/rtk

Build logs are verbose by nature. git diff output in large repos is huge. npm install output could pass for a science-fiction novel, by word count.

RTK is a Rust CLI proxy that intercepts that output before it enters context and compresses it. Reduction ranges from about 60% to 90%, depending on the output type; for typical build-tool logs it tends toward the high end. It is designed to work alongside Headroom.

Together they hit both ends: what goes through the API and what arrives from the terminal.

MemStack: the token drain almost nobody notices until it is too late

GitHub: cwinvestments/memstack

This one matters most—and is the least obvious.

By default, Claude Code has no memory across sessions. Every new conversation, context switch, or return to a project after a break starts from scratch. It re-reads files it already read. It rebuilds its mental model of the repo structure.

On large projects, that happens before any real work begins. It is like hiring a senior engineer who forgets everything between meetings and needs an hour of onboarding every time you talk.

MemStack gives Claude Code persistent memory across sessions. It keeps what Claude already learned about the repository—structure, patterns, architecture decisions—and reuses it instead of rebuilding from zero on every prompt.

Under heavy use with multiple sessions, this is probably the largest win of the three. It shows up least often in “token optimization” threads because the waste is silent, spread across many sessions.

How the three work together

Each tool targets a different layer:

  • Headroom — compresses API traffic
  • RTK — compresses CLI output before it enters context
  • MemStack — cuts redundant reads across sessions

The compound effect is what matters. Running all three in parallel with three or more active sessions is not saving tokens in one place only; you reduce consumption at every point where it accumulates.

Setup and usage

I put together a script that installs and configures all three automatically. It detects your OS, installs each tool the right way, wires up Claude Code hooks, and sets the shell environment variables you need. It asks where to install MemStack (global or per project) and whether you want optional semantic-search dependencies. The rest is automatic.

The script: Claude Code — bigger limit / full stack setup on our Resources page.

One last thing

Maybe the limit really is the problem for you. Maybe you do all of this and it still is not enough—and you will say you tried everything and it did not help.

That is OK.

The point here is to give you more tools for your vibe-coding toolkit and help you ship more work.