Honey PX
An image's token cost is fixed by its pixel area, not its character count.
Dense text packs ~3 chars per image-token vs ~1 as text, so a 90k-char file
read as PNG pages costs a fraction of the text read. pxpipe export
(teamchong/pxpipe) does the rendering; the agent Reads the pages.
Lossy by design — misreads of exact strings are silent confabulations,
not errors. The export writes a factsheet.txt carrying the verbatim
precision tokens (paths, SHAs, ids, numbers) as text alongside the images;
always read it too.
When to use
- Bulk is read-only reference: skimming a big vendored file, a large diff for review context, docs, generated code — content you reason over, not byte-copy.
- Dense (code, JSON, logs) and big — worth it above ~6k chars; the
export prints
% saved, skip if it's low. Sparse prose loses money. - The reader is Fable-class. Opus misreads ~7% of renders; other models degrade — read as text there.
Don't use
- Files you will Edit —
old_stringmust be byte-exact; imaged reads aren't. Read the real file (withoffset/limit) before any edit. - Secrets, hashes, ids, numeric values you'll act on — treat anything
exact recalled from an image as unverified; re-
Grepthe source first. - Anything the user asked to see verbatim, or that gets written back.
- Small or sparse content — the fixed pixel cost loses.
How
shnpx pxpipe-proxy export --json --out <scratchpad> <file-or-dir> # or --git / --diff <ref> / --stdin
Output dir pxpipe-export-<hash>/ contains page-*.png, factsheet.txt,
manifest.json (token report). Then:
Readeverypage-*.pngandfactsheet.txt. If instead you pass the renders to a model over the raw API (subagent prompt, panel), include the export'sprompt.txtbanner — naked dense renders can tripstop_reason: refusalon Fable-class models; the banner prevents it.- Treat the manifest's
percentSavedas the go/no-go — if it printed low, read the text instead. - Before acting on any exact string seen only in an image, verify it against
the source with
Grep.
Cheaper still is not reading at all — Grep/offset/limit (Lever 3b) and
eson crush (CCR) come first. PX is for when you genuinely need the whole
bulk in view.
