Your Session History Is Bleeding Tokens Every Time You Paste

Everyone optimizes what they type into Claude.
Nobody optimizes what they paste.

But developers paste constantly. GitHub READMEs. Research papers. API docs. Jira tickets. Confluence pages. Slack threads.

Every time you copy a webpage, your clipboard picks up everything. The navigation. The footer. The boilerplate. The cookie banners. The share buttons rendered as plain text.

You wanted the content. Claude got the garbage too. And you paid for every token of it.

The numbers

Real token counts from live Claude Code sessions:

Content	Before	After	Saved
GitHub README (trooper)	4,600	1,200	74%
Research paper (arXiv)	4,800	1,900	60%
GitHub README (caveman)	1,800	600	67%
API documentation	105	35	67%
tokslayer's own README	800	170	79%
Average			67%

Where the savings actually land

First turn input tokens are paid in full. The saving is on two things:

Output tokens. Claude responds to the compressed version, so answers are shorter and more focused.

Session history. The compressed version stays in context, not the bloated original. Every subsequent turn in that session carries 3,400 fewer tokens of history. Long sessions with multiple pastes, this compounds hard.

Note: A subagent-based approach was considered but doesn't fully solve this .It can't shrink the user's original pasted message in that turn. A write-path
proxy is the correct fix, rewriting the outgoing request on every turn
including history resends. That's the roadmap direction.

What's actually happening when you paste

When you copy a GitHub page you get the content plus:

"Skip to content" navigation
Repo tabs (Code, Issues, Pull requests, Actions...)
Breadcrumbs and branch selectors
Footer links
Share buttons rendered as text
License metadata

None of that is the README. All of it hits Claude's context window. All of it costs tokens.

The fix

A Claude Code skill that sits between your clipboard and Claude. Detects pasted content. Strips the noise. Sends only the signal.

No proxy. No server. No MCP. No configuration. One file. Drop it in. Restart Claude Code. Done.

Receipt on every paste:

ORIGINAL:  "Skip to content shouvik12 trooper Repository..."  (~4,600 tokens)
OPTIMIZED: "Trooper: LLM proxy. Local-first. Ollama default..."  (~1,200 tokens)
SAVED:     ~3,400 tokens (74%)

What gets stripped: nav chrome, footers, filler phrases, redundant sentences, marketing boilerplate.

What stays: headings, code blocks, API signatures, URLs, numbers, technical terms, proper nouns.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shouvik12/tokslayer/main/install.sh | bash

Restart Claude Code. Works on every paste automatically from that point on.

The meta test

Ran tokslayer's own README through itself and typed "summarize":

ORIGINAL:  "tokslayer, Slays tokens before they reach Claude..."  (~800 tokens)
OPTIMIZED: "Tokslayer: Claude Code skill. Compresses pasted content..."  (~170 tokens)
SAVED:     ~630 tokens (79%)

A tool that eats its own cooking.