Spotify’s engineering blog had a post about a Claude Code plugin called shunt that cut the author’s token usage by ~90%. The idea is simple: when Claude tries to read a huge file, a hook blocks it and tells Claude to ask a cheaper model about the file instead. The file goes to the cheap model, and only the answer comes back into your session. The catch is that it runs through Spotify Portal (their Backstage product) and its AiKA modes. No Portal instance, no shunt. So I swapped the transport. shunt-muse keeps Spotify’s hooks, scripts and skills, and replaces the Portal call with a headless muse exec call to Muse Spark. Everything else works the same: Full reads of files over 350 lines get blocked (Read tool, and bare cat/head/tail). Reads with offset/limit and piped commands still go through, so editing works normally. bulk-read sends files + a question to Muse and returns a short answer. code-write generates boilerplate (tests, config, stubs) from a spec and a reference file. The hooks exit with code 2 instead of printing Claude-specific JSON, so the same hook also works in Codex. One real run: a 617-line file, ~4,800 tokens went to Muse, ~300 came back into Claude, 24 seconds at low effort. The summary was accurate when I checked it against the file. I haven’t reproduced Spotify’s 90% figure on a big codebase, that’s their number, not mine. Install: claude plugin marketplace add alexanderradahl/shunt-muse claude plugin install shunt-muse@muse-shunt Codex setup is in the README. Repo: https://github.com/alexanderradahl/shunt-muse Caveats: your files go to Meta’s API (whichever Muse tier you’re on), so check the data terms before pointing it at anything sensitive. And bulk reads take 20-60 seconds, so this trades time for context. Swapping muse exec for any other headless CLI should be a small change in one file, scripts/lib/muse.sh . Happy to take PRs. submitted by /u/alexid95
Originally posted by u/alexid95 on r/ClaudeCode