Daily Logs for June 26, 2026
Dear Vishi, dear logs for today.
Headroom
Today I tried Headroom with Codex. I mostly use Codex from the terminal, and sometimes the session becomes too noisy because of long diffs, logs, and command outputs. All of that text goes into the LLM context, so even simple work can start consuming many tokens.
Headroom is useful here because it wraps Codex and compresses the terminal context before sending it to the model. I am launching Codex like this:
alias headroom="HEADROOM_TELEMETRY=off headroom wrap codex"
This means headroom starts codex for me, and I do not have to change how I work inside Codex. The wrapper handles the compression layer.
One important detail: Headroom itself uses rtk for token compression. So rtk needs to be installed.
brew install rtk
The drawback is that compression can sometimes hide details. If I am debugging a very specific issue, I still want to see the raw output. But for normal coding sessions, this feels like a good way to save tokens without changing my workflow too much.
Erythritol
I found a BUBBL'R sparkling water at Food Lion. I read the label and noticed erythritol. This is one of those sugar alcohols used in many "zero sugar" and "zero calorie" drinks.
The marketing is simple: it tastes sweet, has very few calories, and does not behave like table sugar. Table sugar is quickly broken down into glucose and fructose, and glucose can raise blood sugar and insulin. Erythritol is different. A large part of it is absorbed into the blood and then excreted unchanged in urine, so it usually has a much smaller effect on blood glucose.
But "does not raise sugar much" does not automatically mean "healthy." That is the part I was thinking about. There is a study here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10334259/ which links higher erythritol levels with cardiovascular risk and also suggests that erythritol may make platelets more reactive.
Small refresher for myself: platelets are tiny blood components that help clotting. Red blood cells carry oxygen using hemoglobin. Platelets are useful when you are bleeding because they help seal the wound. But if platelets become too reactive inside blood vessels, that can increase clot risk.
So the concern is not that erythritol is exactly like sugar. The concern is different: it may have vascular or clotting effects that are not obvious from the nutrition label. Also, labels usually do not tell the exact amount of erythritol, so it is hard to know the real dose from one drink or from multiple "keto" snacks.
The body can also make a small amount of erythritol naturally through glucose metabolism, including the pentose phosphate pathway. But that is not the same as drinking or eating a large added dose from processed food.
Xylitol is another sugar alcohol used in keto products and sugar-free ice creams. I need to read more about that separately. For now, my takeaway is simple: sugar-free does not always mean risk-free.
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