Compress Tool Output Losslessly First, Before You Spend Your Lossy Budget

~59% fewer tokens vs pretty-printed JSON on a real GitHub-API corpus (436->181 on 5 issues); but much of that is plain minification, the incremental lossless win is ~0-30% per tool and near-zero on already-minified or text-heavy output. No accuracy risk by construction. Advanced 3 min read

Before you reach for a lossy summarize-or-truncate pass on bloated tool output, run a lossless structural pass that can't drop a single value: minify whitespace, state field names once, and legend-code repeats, all behind a round-trip gate. You bank a guaranteed, risk-free cut and save your lossy budget for the text-heavy tail.

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