This smells heavily of astroturfing. Particularly because Headroom is a paid product, and that fact is not mentioned here or in the GitHub README.

Here was my experience…

I download and run the Mac application, which starts installing a bunch of things. Then the following happens without advance notice:

- Adds background item(s) from "Idiosyncratocracy BV"

- Downloads over 2 GB of files

- Pollutes home with ~/.headroom directory

- Adds hook(s) to ~/.claude/hooks/

- Modifies your ~/.claude/settings.json to add above hook(s)

… and then I see something in the settings that talks about creating an account. That's when I realized that this is a paid product, after all of the above has happened.

Headroom seems to use https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk under the hood. What does Headroom offer over the actually-free RTK? Who knows.

At this point I have had it with this subterfuge — I immediately trash the app and every related file and folder I can find, of which there are many. Hopefully I got them all, but who knows. There should have been an easy way to uninstall this mess, but of course there isn't.

The lack of transparency here is really concerning.

Different positionning - headroom compress inputs and open source project - caveman is output and open source - edgee more corporate offer

Headroom looks great for client-side trimming. If you want to tackle this at the infrastructure level, we built Edgee (https://www.edgee.ai) as an AI Gateway that handles context compression, caching, and token budgeting across requests, so you're not relying on each client to do the right thing.

(I work at Edgee, so biased, but happy to answer questions.)

I tried to use rtk for the same, and my agent session would just loop the same tool call over and over again. Does headroom work better?