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anshal21 merged 2 commits into from
Jul 10, 2026
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Docs: Why whittle covers both surfaces; policy authoring guide #7

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docs: why-write-time.md becomes why-whittle.md, covering both surfaces
Jul 10, 2026
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docs: policy authoring guide (docs/POLICY.md)
Jul 10, 2026
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6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions README.md
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Expand Up @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
<strong><a href="docs/compression.md">Compression</a></strong> ·
<strong><a href="docs/ROUTER.md">Model routing</a></strong> ·
<strong><a href="bench/README.md">Benchmarks</a></strong> ·
<strong><a href="docs/why-write-time.md">Why whittle?</a></strong>
<strong><a href="docs/why-whittle.md">Why whittle?</a></strong>
</p>

Long agent sessions drown in tokens, and most compressors buy their ratio by silently destroying what agents need: array rows vanish, file reads get gutted, identifiers come back mangled. Whittle holds one line: **lossless or clearly marked, code never touched, every anomaly fails open to the original bytes.**
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -77,7 +77,7 @@ The full per-type contract, ML prose path, architecture, and performance tables:

Whittle's second surface: a local proxy on `ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL` that sends each request to the cheapest model tier that can still handle it, per a policy you can read in one screen.

- **Calibrated out of the box**: `whittle policy init` writes a conservative default (hard reasoning → strongest tier, confident chit-chat → cheapest, *everything else untouched*) with your account's real model ids auto-detected. [What it does & how to customize](router/policies/default.md).
- **Calibrated out of the box**: `whittle policy init` writes a conservative default (hard reasoning → strongest tier, confident chit-chat → cheapest, *everything else untouched*) with your account's real model ids auto-detected. [What the default does](router/policies/default.md) · [how to write your own policy](docs/POLICY.md).
- **Multi-signal, not keyword-matching**: a trained 14-subject classifier (probability-mass thresholded, so an *uncertain* classification never escalates), a contrastive difficulty score, and your own keywords. Every log line shows each signal's value against its gate.
- **Rewrites the model, never your history**: prompt-cache prefixes survive; capabilities the cheaper model rejects are stripped automatically; credentials pass through untouched.
- **Never blocks you**: bad policy, dead classifier, or a rejected rewrite all fall back to your original request. Unset the env var and you're direct again.
Expand All @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@ Most context compressors are read-time proxies: they rewrite your conversation h
| loss model | lossless or marked | lossy by default, recover on demand |
| cost of failure | original bytes | a broken or blocked call |

The full argument: [docs/why-write-time.md](docs/why-write-time.md).
The full argument, and why routing is a different kind of proxy: [docs/why-whittle.md](docs/why-whittle.md).

## FAQ

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