FAQ

Tetris sits between your coding assistant and the model. When the assistant is about to send a tool call, Tetris intercepts it locally, compresses the large text fields (file bodies, edit diffs, long pasted logs) using an eight-stage pipeline, and hands the compressed version back. The assistant sends the compressed version to the model. The model sees less context, you pay for fewer tokens.

Tetris runs locally on your machine. It only sees what your assistant was already about to send to the model — the tool-call payload. That data is processed in-process and never uploaded anywhere. No file content, no diffs, no prompts, no tool names leave your machine. See the privacy page for receipts.

Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Aider, Factory Droid, Trae, Antigravity, Hermes, and Copilot. Full matrix with settings-file paths and known limitations is on the platforms page.

The license verifies your device count and monthly cap locally — it doesn’t gate compression in the hot path (the check is cached once per process). The license exists so the Free plan can cap at $150/mo of savings and the Pro plan can lift that cap.

There’s a 72-hour offline grace. If the license server is unreachable for longer than that, Tetris pauses compression (it still lets your tool call through unchanged) until it can verify again. Run tetris login when you’re back online.

Yes — free up to $150/mo in savings, every strategy, every supported assistant, three devices. No credit card required. Pricing.

Every compression event records tokens_before and tokens_after using the tokenizer of the destination model (Claude uses Anthropic’s tokenizer, GPT uses cl100k_base, etc.). Savings are the difference. Sessions that grew the token count are counted as zero, never negative. Full methodology: how we measure.

The CLI itself runs entirely on your machine; there is nothing to host for the core feature. The license server and anonymized heartbeat endpoint are hosted by us. Enterprise customers on the air-gap plan get a self-hostable license server. Contact sales.

The compression hook adds on the order of tens of milliseconds for typical tool calls. Network I/O (license heartbeat) is rate-limited to once every six hours and runs detached — it never blocks the hot path. If the network is unplugged, tetris completes normally.

If compression fails to save tokens (short prompts, already-dense inputs), tetris emits “allow with no change” and your assistant sends the original unchanged. You never pay latency for a net-zero compression.

On your machine, under ~/.tetris/ (or $TETRIS_DATA_DIR). The session ledger is an append-only JSONL file. License JWT, install ID, and machine UID live there too. Uninstall leaves this directory alone; delete it manually if you want a clean wipe.

Run tetris doctor and include the output. Email help@tetris.codes or, if the bug concerns savings math, savings@tetris.codes.