skimread MCP server

skimread — skim before you read

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.avikchakraborty060-create/skimread -->

A lossless context guard for AI coding agents. Zero dependencies, runs entirely on your machine, MIT licensed. Works with Claude Code out of the box, and with any other agent (Codex, Cursor, Aider, Copilot, your own) through a CLI and an MCP server.

What is it?

When you use an AI coding agent, you pay for every token it reads. Most of that money goes to two things the agent does not actually need:

1. Reading big files whole. The agent wants one function and reads all 2,000 lines of the file to find it. Next session it does it again.
2. Reading noisy command output. pytest -v prints 1,500 PASSED lines to tell you about 2 failures. npm install prints 40 deprecation warnings. cargo build lists every crate it compiled.

skimread sits between the agent and those two sources and hands the agent a skim first:

• For files: an outline instead of the file. When the agent is about to read a large file, skimread gives it a map of the file (functions, classes, headings, keys, each with its line range) and says "read only the slice you need". The agent then reads 60 lines instead of 2,000.
• For commands: a digest instead of the dump. Noisy commands run through skimread. The agent sees the errors, the failing tests, the stack frames in your code, and the summary line. The 1,500 PASSED lines are folded into one line that says so.

The key word is lossless. Nothing is thrown away. Every command's full output is kept on your disk, and every digest ends with a handle (skimread show 42, skimread show 42 120-180, skimread show 42 --grep TypeError). Every outline tells the agent exactly which line range to read next. The agent is never stuck and never has to re-run a build to see what it missed.

Why not one of the existing output compressors?

Tools that compress shell output already exist (RTK, token-saver, condense). They share two limits. They cannot touch the agent's own file-reading tool, which is the bigger token sink. And they are lossy: when the compressor drops the one line the agent needed, the agent re-runs the command, and an independent benchmark found that this can cost more than not compressing at all. skimread guards file reads too, and keeps everything retrievable.

What it is not

• Not a cloud service. No network calls, no accounts, no telemetry. ~/.skimread is the whole state.
• Not an LLM. Everything is deterministic parsing and folding, so it runs in milliseconds and costs nothing.
• Not a summariser that guesses. It never rewrites a line; it only hides lines it can name and count, and tells you how to get them back.

Numbers

Measured on real tool output (fixtures in tests/fixtures, reproduce with python bench/bench.py). Token counts are estimates (chars / 3.6).

The last two rows are the point: when the output is already pure signal (a short build with two errors), skimread leaves it alone. Savings come from noise, never from hiding failures.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.