Qarinah cuts AI coding-agent context tokens by 98.7% while retaining full retrieval
Qarinah is an open-source tool that compresses project memory into a compact, cited pack rather than replaying an entire codebase history at the start of each AI coding-agent session. In a benchmark across six software-task fixtures, the full-history baseline required 442,113 estimated input-context tokens, while Qarinah's approach used just 5,682 — a reduction of 98.71%. Despite the compression, every required retrieval target was still found within the top five results, and the tool passed all 380 deterministic file-specific queries across projects of varying sizes. The estimated token savings translate to lower input costs across common provider pricing tiers, though the figures exclude caching, output tokens, and other real-world billing factors. Qarinah is Apache-2.0 licensed, local-first, and compatible with tools such as Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, with all benchmark methodology and fixture data made publicly available.
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