LeanCTX
July 30, 2026 · View on GitHub
Product vision:
VISION.md
Software ate the world. Agents are eating software. And every agent is exactly as good as the context it is given — context decides what an agent knows, what it may do, and what it provably did. Today that context is unmanaged: untyped markdown, copy-pasted prompts, vendor-locked memory, zero provenance.
LeanCTX makes context infrastructure: efficient, verifiable, portable, organizational — managed with the same rigor as code.
One product, three pillars
| Pillar | What it does | Who it serves |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | Active token reduction — compression, MCP tools, agent hooks, local dashboard | Individual developers |
| Gateway | Org-wide LLM proxy — usage tracking, budget enforcement, FinOps, compliance | Companies, Ops, FinOps, CISOs |
| Cloud | Hosted services — accounts, sync, team provisioning, billing, registry | Teams, Pro users, managed enterprise |
The Engine ships in the open-source binary (lean-ctx). Gateway and Cloud capabilities are available through lean-ctx-enterprise (see ADR-023). Enterprise tiers add org-scale governance, hosting, and managed infrastructure.
Engine
The developer-facing context compression layer: 10 read modes, 95+ shell
compression patterns, tree-sitter AST for 27 languages, semantic search with
hybrid BM25 + dense retrieval, session continuity protocol (~400 tokens instead
of ~50K cold start). Ships as MCP tools (ctx_read, ctx_compose,
ctx_search, …) and transparent agent hooks.
Gateway
The org-wide LLM reverse proxy: intercepts Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini and
ChatGPT traffic, compresses prompts in-flight, meters per-request cost
attribution, enforces budgets, and provides FinOps dashboards. Available through lean-ctx-enterprise (ADR-023).
Cloud
The hosted coordination layer: user accounts, team provisioning, knowledge sync, billing edge, and the context package registry. Enables Pro/Team/ Enterprise tiers without requiring self-hosted infrastructure.
Companion projects
| Project | Role |
|---|---|
| ctxpkg.org | Open standard for signed, typed context packages (.ctxpkg) |
| ctxpkg.com | Registry and marketplace for context packages |
Doctrines
- Zero telemetry, absolutely — nothing leaves a machine automatically; explicit, locally computed, user-invoked shares only.
- Trust is never for sale — no paid placement, ranking or verification on any surface.
- Local-Free Invariant — every feature works self-hosted for free; commercial tiers add hosting and support, never capabilities.
- Distilled, typed, signed knowledge only — never raw transcripts.