honey-px

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_string must be byte-exact; imaged reads aren't. Read the real file (with offset/limit) before any edit.
• Secrets, hashes, ids, numeric values you'll act on — treat anything exact recalled from an image as unverified; re-Grep the source first.
• Anything the user asked to see verbatim, or that gets written back.
• Small or sparse content — the fixed pixel cost loses.

How

npx 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:

1. Read every page-*.png and factsheet.txt. If instead you pass the renders to a model over the raw API (subagent prompt, panel), include the export's prompt.txt banner — naked dense renders can trip stop_reason: refusal on Fable-class models; the banner prevents it.
2. Treat the manifest's percentSaved as the go/no-go — if it printed low, read the text instead.
3. Before acting on any exact string seen only in an image, verify it against the source with Grep.