ripwire-efficient

# Be token-efficient with ripwire > Routing — this is the cross-cutting discipline; for the specific MOMENT, use its skill: > • Cold-start / "how does X work / where is Y" (the understand moment) → **ripwire-orient**. > • Tracing one call graph / locating a literal → **ripwire-navigate**. > • Not sure which skill at all → **ripwire-router**. Reading files is the single biggest token sink in an agent loop, and exploratory reads snowball — every verbose read inflates every later step. `ripwire` (on PATH) replaces exploratory reads with a deterministic, PageRank-ranked map. The discipline is one line: **map before you read.** ## Why this isn't just about cost — it's about accuracy This is the load-bearing fact, not a nice-to-have: **less context is more accurate, not just cheaper.** - Code-repair accuracy **collapses with context size**: Claude 3.5 Sonnet went **29% → 3%** on LongSWE-Bench as context grew 32K → 256K tokens (LongCodeBench, arXiv:2505.07897). A newer, independent result agrees: with localization held constant, compressed source reached the same editing accuracy at roughly 3.7× fewer tokens than whole-file context (arXiv:2607.09691). - A **~300-token** focused prompt **beat** a **~113K-token** full-file dump on the same task (Chroma context-rot study, 2025) — more context didn't just cost more, it made the model worse. - Position matters: actionable content at the END of a long input measured **up to +30%** (Anthropic) — the evidence behind `--order=i...