Welcome

CULP is a Claude Code plugin and a cross-platform CLI. It works on the harness around Claude Code: the hooks it runs, the tools it loads, and the context it carries from turn to turn. It cuts what that harness costs.

It does not change the model you selected, and it does not raise a limit Anthropic set. Your limit is your limit. CULP reduces the waste inside it, so the same limit carries more work.

The one fact everything follows from

An output token costs roughly five times an input token. Most of what a coding session spends is output: the model writing source, and the model repeating source it has already read so a tool can find it again.

Every feature in CULP is an attack on one of those two costs.

• Compact decoding replaces the source you write with a short notation that a server expands into real code before the file is written. You pay for the notation; the file gets the code.
• The patch tool lets you name the region of a file to replace instead of quoting it back. You never re-emit text the file already has.
• Delegated search answers Glob and Grep in a separate cheap session and returns only the ranked matches, so a thousand-line result never lands in your context.
• The CLAUDE.md splitter turns an oversized memory file into a compact root plus documents that load only when they are needed.
• MCP relocation moves servers you rarely call out of the loaded tool list and into a CLI you can invoke when you actually need them.

What it changes, it changes reversibly

Nothing is authored on your behalf. A patch replaces a region that is already in your file, byte for byte, and a region CULP cannot tell apart is refused by name rather than guessed at.

Where to go next

Install it, then read Understanding CULP so the messages it prints make sense the first time you see one.