Laconic – Compress what a coding agent carries, not what it says.

Status: the opt-in OMP runtime beta is published. Version 0.10.0 adds read-only spend-composition reporting to the installable package. The repository also records the immutable incomplete M20-v1 result and an execution-disabled M20-v2 protocol. The predeclared real-OMP qualification campaign passed with every safety counter at zero — see docs/runtime-beta-report.md. It is a beta: installation is explicit and opt-in, and it makes no token, cost, cache, or behavior savings claim.

Laconic is a private, local runtime codec for existing coding agents. It reduces eligible model-visible read, bash, grep, and glob observations while preserving exact, on-demand access to omitted content. It integrates with OMP rather than replacing it.

docs/grounding.md is the authoritative statement of what Laconic is, what it deliberately is not, and how to detect strategy drift. Read it before proposing or reviewing changes.

How Laconic differs from Headroom

Headroom is a broad context-compression platform: libraries, a local provider proxy, MCP tools, agent wrappers, multiple compressors, memory, cache-aware request handling, and optional output shaping. Laconic is intentionally narrower. It intercepts OMP tool results inside the host, leaves provider configuration unchanged, and focuses on coding-agent observations backed by exact local recovery.

Laconic's strongest distinction is file reads. Headroom's default coding profile protects reads because agents need exact source bytes. Laconic stores those exact bytes first, then can replace a large read with a structural outline and requested span while preserving exact full or line-span expansion until explicit purge. The OMP beta adds strict-smaller replacement, bounded fail-open behavior, owner-namespaced recovery, explicit operator controls, and no Laconic telemetry or hosted service.

Headroom is the stronger choice for broad client, provider, content-type, and framework coverage. Laconic is the stronger fit when the requirement is an OMP-native, provider-neutral, auditable observation boundary with durable exact recovery. No controlled head-to-head study establishes a token, cost, cache, latency, or behavior advantage for either system on the same coding-agent tasks. See docs/headroom-comparison.md for the version-pinned comparison, evidence limits, and source links.

Install the runtime

uv tool install laconic
laconic install omp --dry-run
laconic install omp

Start OMP normally. Use /laconic status|pause|resume in the active session, laconic status for content-free aggregate health, and laconic expand '<session>/F1[:first-last]' for exact operator recovery. See docs/omp-runtime.md before installing or purging data.

Documentation

Source checkout

Releases from 0.9.0 onward contain the runtime, codec, evaluation, rendering, and Observe surfaces. Version 0.10.0 adds read-only spend-composition reporting to the installable package and versions repository-only controlled-spend research tooling; M20-v2 remains execution-disabled. Versions up to 0.8.0 had no live runtime integration and exposed research commands at the top level, such as laconic measure and laconic gates. Since 0.9.0 those commands live under the explicit research namespace:

uv run laconic research measure tests/corpus --expect tests/corpus/expected.json
uv run laconic research gates --corpus tests/corpus --format json
laconic --help

The committed fixture reports K1 net savings of 8.53% against its pre-registered 15% research threshold. It validates the gate machinery but is not representative deployment evidence. That result does not block the bounded OMP beta, and the beta will not claim general token, cost, cache, or behavior savings from character reduction. The qualification campaign separately measured 35.84% character reduction across ten agent-driven read-heavy investigation sessions; that figure describes that workload only, and no savings threshold gates the beta. See the "Beta qualification result" section of docs/omp-runtime.md for how the campaign was produced and what it does not establish.

Product roadmap

1. Build a transport-neutral session engine with namespaced exact recovery and strict-smaller decisions.
2. Package an ownership-safe OMP extension with a 250 ms deadline, fail-open behavior, expansion, and operator controls.
3. Qualify the built package through at least 10 completed real OMP sessions across 3 repositories and at least 100 eligible observations.
4. Publish the opt-in OMP beta. Published as v0.9.0, with v0.9.1 correcting a cold-start defect that only a clean first install could reach.
5. Measure where model spend goes and build a controlled-comparison protocol without overclaiming. The single-arm composition report contains no savings figure; M20-v1 ended incomplete; M20-v2 remains execution-disabled pending separate authorization.
6. Design the Claude Code adapter separately after the protocol survives OMP dogfood. MCP, action rewriting, and history compaction remain deferred.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.