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Token Terminator Wiki

Keep the evidence. Terminate the redundant tokens.

Token Terminator is an agent-runtime optimization layer that reduces provider-visible token bloat at tool-result and final-request boundaries while preserving exact recoverability. Hermes Agent has the turnkey adapter; the reduction core itself is ordinary Python + SQLite and can be integrated with other runtimes.

Start here

• Quick Start — install v0.5.1 and verify it is active.
• Architecture — understand the host/adapter/core boundary.
• Modes and Reduction Pipeline — see what each mode enables.
• Configuration — all important environment controls.
• Vault and Exact Recovery — artifact identity, receipts, retention, and recovery.
• Security and Trust Model — local data, RTK trust boundary, and fail-open rules.
• Troubleshooting — common symptoms and checks.

The core contract

A transformation is accepted only when it is safer than passing the original through:

1. the complete provider-visible result is strictly smaller;
2. if an exact tokenizer is available, measured token count also decreases;
3. exact evidence has been written to the private vault and verified by read-back when recovery is required;
4. caller-owned request objects are not mutated;
5. any unsupported or unsafe condition fails open to the original request/result.

Temporal terminal reduction adds one more rule: the command still executes every time. Only the representation shown to the model may become a smaller delta.

What v0.5.1 hardened

v0.5.1 is the post-0.5.0 hardening release. It adds bounded vault lifecycle management, Unicode-safe artifact search, cwd-aware rewrite caching, async temporal parity, schema-owned temporal snapshots, more honest experiment statistics, Windows URI fixes, safer permissions, RTK path pinning, and recovery-safe GC. Artifacts already named by accepted recovery receipts or temporal deltas are protected from automatic retention pruning.

Current release

• Python package/release: v0.5.1
• Python support: 3.10–3.13
• Rust interoperability crate: token-terminator 0.5.1
• First-party runtime adapter: Hermes Agent