| name | honey-px |
| description | Read huge, dense, read-only text as rendered PNG pages instead of raw text — image tokens scale with pixels, not characters, so token-dense bulk (big files, vendored code, diffs, logs) costs ~60–75% less as an image. Use when you must skim or reason over thousands of lines you will NOT edit or byte-copy. Lossy on exact strings: never for files you'll Edit, secrets, hashes, or byte-exact values. Fable-class readers only. |
| license | MIT |
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>
Output dir pxpipe-export-<hash>/ contains page-*.png, factsheet.txt,
manifest.json (token report). Then:
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.- Treat the manifest's
percentSaved as the go/no-go — if it printed low,
read the text instead.
- Before acting on any exact string seen only in an image, verify it against
the source with
Grep.
Cheaper still is not reading at all — Grep/offset/limit (Lever 3b) and
eson crush (CCR) come first. PX is for when you genuinely need the whole
bulk in view.
