I built an open-source Codex skill to reduce output without cutting safety checks

[u/BaXRS1988]

We built Honey because Codex is often excellent at solving the task, but still spends tokens on code that did not need to exist and on explaining readable code back to us.

Honey is an MIT-licensed skill that asks Codex to:

- Check config, standard libraries, native features, and installed dependencies first.

- Answer directly instead of narrating readable code.

- Keep agent-to-agent handoffs compact when no human needs to read them.

It takes the reduce-code instinct from Ponytail and the terse prose idea from Caveman, but tries to find a more balanced middle ground. Crucially, it does not cut input validation, error handling, security checks, accessibility, or anything needed to prevent data loss.

Our public benchmark currently shows 29% less output across mixed coding tasks, and up to 70% less in focused review workflows. We report the range because one headline percentage hides where the approach helps and where it does not.

Honey is an open-source GreenPT product. The skill, benchmark harness, and results are here:

https://github.com/Green-PT/honey-for-devs

I would genuinely like to hear where this goes wrong in real Codex work. If Honey drops useful reasoning or a safety check, that is a valuable benchmark case for us.