Quickstart

TokenShift + Claude Code in 60 seconds. By the end of this page, every Bash tool call Claude Code makes flows through a compression pipeline and the agent stops paying for tokens it didn’t need.

Prerequisites

• Claude Code installed and working.
• gh auth login against the pointfiveinc org (Homebrew tap auth, see Homebrew install).
• An enrollment.json from your TokenShift admin — required for telemetry, recovery sync, and any cloud-side feature. Skippable if you only want the local proxy and hooks.

Install

1. Install the binary via Homebrew.

   brew install pointfiveinc/tap/tokenshift

   For org-wide rollouts, MDM pushes the same package — see MDM rollout.

2. Wire the Claude Code hooks.

   tokenshift install

   This drops PostToolUse / PreToolUse / SessionStart hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json. The picker also asks about telemetry opt-in the first time you run it.

3. Bind the binary to your tenant.

   tokenshift enroll ~/Downloads/enrollment.json

   This writes the manifest to ~/.tokenshift/enrollment.json. Without it, TokenShift still compresses locally — telemetry just stays off. See Enrollment for the full model.

4. Verify the wire is live end-to-end.

   tokenshift doctor --verify

   This ships one synthetic record through the live ingest path and reports acceptance. Drop the --verify flag for a no-network status check.

Tip

tokenshift doctor is also the first thing to run when something feels off — it reports pinning, manifest, telemetry, and hook state in one block.

What just happened

• Claude Code’s Bash tool now invokes tokenshift hook post-tool after every shell command. The hook matches the command against the rule index, runs a compression pipeline, and rewrites the tool output the LLM sees.
• Full output is preserved in a local recovery cache. The LLM gets a hint like [Full output: tokenshift recover a1b2c3d4] and can fetch the original whenever it needs it.
• Telemetry, if you enrolled, ships hybrid-encrypted records straight to the ingest worker. No control plane, no broker.

Next

• How it works — the architectural overview.
• What gets compressed — the categories of output TokenShift recognizes.
• Security overview — what stays local, what goes off-device.