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Quick Start

Quick Start

Section titled “Quick Start”

This guide walks you through your first RTK commands after installation.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

RTK is installed and verified:

Terminal window
rtk --version   # rtk x.y.z
rtk gain        # shows token savings dashboard

If not, see Installation.

Step 1: Initialize for your AI assistant

Section titled “Step 1: Initialize for your AI assistant”
Terminal window
# For Claude Code (global — applies to all projects)
rtk init --global


# For a single project only
cd /your/project && rtk init

This installs the hook that automatically rewrites commands. Restart your AI assistant after this step.

Step 2: Use your tools normally

Section titled “Step 2: Use your tools normally”

Once the hook is installed, nothing changes in how you work. Your AI assistant runs commands as usual — the hook intercepts them transparently and rewrites them before execution.

For example, when Claude Code runs cargo test, the hook rewrites it to rtk cargo test before it executes. The LLM receives filtered output with only the failures — not 500 lines of passing tests. You never see or type rtk.

RTK covers all major ecosystems — Git, Cargo/Rust, JavaScript, Python, Go, Ruby, .NET, Docker/Kubernetes, and more. See What RTK Optimizes for the full list.

Step 3: Check your savings

Section titled “Step 3: Check your savings”

After a few commands, see how much was saved:

Terminal window
rtk gain
Total commands : 12
Input tokens   : 45,230
Output tokens  : 4,890
Saved          : 40,340  (89.2%)

Step 4: Unsupported commands

Section titled “Step 4: Unsupported commands”

Commands RTK doesn’t recognize run through passthrough — output is unchanged, usage is tracked:

Terminal window
rtk proxy make install

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”