hush

TL;DR — Claude bills you for every word it reads and writes, and most of those words are logs, build output, and play-by-play. hush trims them at the source, automatically. Install it, change nothing, pay less: $0.174 an average session against $0.211 without it.

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What is this?

You've seen it: "Let me start by looking at the codebase." "Now I'll check the config." Four hundred lines of build output you didn't ask for, and — eventually — the one sentence you actually needed. Every word of that is billed.

hush doesn't ask Claude to "be more concise" and hope for the best. It trims the actual bulk — logs, command output, narration — at the source, before any of it hits your bill. It earns its keep in real engineering sessions, the kind that read logs and run builds, because that's where the noise lives.

Why you'd want it

• Cheaper sessions. The two biggest sources of bulk — noisy output and narration — get shrunk, so long sessions cost less.
• Easier to read. The answer sits at the top of one final message, not buried in a play-by-play.
• Nothing important is lost. Failing command output, code, diffs, and security warnings are kept whole.
• Zero setup. Install it and it's on. Tune it later only if you feel like it.

How it works

Five small habits, picked up the moment it's installed:

Moment	What happens
Progress narration	Swapped for one clean summary at the end
Command output & log files	Trimmed as they come in — a short tail from a clean run, the whole thing from a failing one
Mid-turn rambling	Caught by a running word count and cut off the moment it starts
Really large output (a huge log, a giant lockfile)	Parked in a local file behind a short summary, so it isn't re-sent in full every turn
Re-reading a file that changed on its own	Shown as just the changed lines, not the whole file again

That's the whole list. No workflow to learn, no dial to find first — it's just how Claude behaves now.

Install

Inside Claude Code, run:

/plugin marketplace add V-Songbird/foundry
/plugin install hush@foundry

Takes effect at your next session — nothing to configure. hush works in the background.

Running razor too? Good instinct — the pair is measured in Better together below.

What you can do

hush runs itself; these commands are extras:

You want to…	Command
Shrink a CLAUDE.md or notes file so every session that loads it costs less	/hush:hush-compress <path>
See exactly what hush trimmed this session	/hush:stats
Try one of the six output styles hush ships, or hand back to stock	/hush:pick-style
Build an output style in your own voice on hush's silent frame	/hush:craft-style

[!IMPORTANT] hush-compress never touches your original — it writes a copy alongside it (CLAUDE.md → CLAUDE.hush.md) for you to review and swap in yourself.

/hush:stats needs HUSH_DEBUG=1 set before the work you want measured. Without it there's nothing to report — and it says so.

/hush:pick-style is the shelf. Six styles ship with hush, same silent machinery underneath, and they differ only in what that one last message is for: