Toon Utils

What This Skill Does

The Toon Utils skill, developed by lythaeon, is a high-performance toolkit designed for token-constrained environments where every byte counts. It introduces TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation), a specialized serialization format engineered to reduce the token overhead of structured data by 30-60%. By transforming verbose JSON structures into a more compact, LLM-friendly syntax, the skill allows agents to process larger datasets within limited context windows, ultimately reducing latency and cost. It functions as a bridge between standard machine-readable formats and the heuristic capabilities of large language models, ensuring that structure is maintained while verbosity is slashed.

Installation

To begin, ensure the OpenClaw agent environment has access to the utility. Run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/lythaeon/toon-utils

For optimal performance and minimal prompt token usage, you must install the global TOON CLI dependency. This ensures the agent calls a direct binary rather than resolving via package managers, which saves critical tokens during automated reasoning tasks:

toon --version || npm install -g @toon-format/cli

Use Cases

• Large API Responses: When an API returns deep, nested JSON objects, piping the output through toon allows the agent to ingest significantly more data without hitting context ceilings.
• Directory Mapping: Developers can use tree -J | toon to provide a condensed overview of massive repository structures for architectural analysis.
• Log Parsing: Compress verbose log files into TOON format before feeding them into an analysis prompt.
• Context Optimization: Keep your workspace context clean by converting temporary configuration files into TOON format to save tokens for actual reasoning tasks.

Example Prompts

1. "Fetch the user data from the API endpoint and process it using toon so I can analyze the JSON schema without using too many tokens."
2. "Show me the structure of the current directory using tree -J and convert it to toon format so you can help me refactor the imports."
3. "Here is a raw JSON payload, pipe it through toon and tell me which keys are missing compared to the standard configuration requirements."

Tips & Limitations

• Piping is Key: Always prefer curl | toon over reading raw files to keep prompt noise to a minimum.
• Dependency Management: Ensure the CLI is globally installed. If the agent fails to find the command, check if the npm path is in your environment variables.
• Readability: While TOON is optimized for LLMs, it remains human-readable, allowing you to manually verify data if needed.
• Data Integrity: Ensure the original JSON is valid before piping; while TOON is efficient, malformed input may result in unexpected transformation errors.