See what your coding agent actually sends — and pay less for it.
Cortex sits in your agent's request path, decrypts its traffic, and shows you the model calls, tool calls and agent-to-agent messages as they happen. It can also strip the tool definitions your agent never calls, which is 4–20% of the prompt on every turn.
One binary, no Kubernetes. macOS or Linux, amd64 or arm64.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rossoctl/cortex/main/authbridge/install.sh \
| sh -s -- --claude-codeIt asks before changing your Claude Code settings, then runs Cortex as a background service that survives crashes and logins.
Then open two terminals:
abctl observe # the viewer
claude # as usual — no environment variables to setYour agent's calls stream into abctl. Cortex only reads them; nothing is rewritten.
- Cut token cost — one more command
- Start, stop, remove —
abctl service status | start | stop - Run it in Kubernetes — sidecars, Keycloak, SPIFFE/SPIRE
Any agent works, not only Claude Code: point it at localhost:47600 and trust
~/.cortex/ca/ca.crt.
The install URL is on main, but the script re-runs the copy from the newest
release, so curl | sh does not execute unreleased code. --ref overrides that for
both halves — script and binaries: --ref=vX.Y.Z pins a release, and --ref=main
installs the unreleased tip
(CONTRIBUTING.md).
Traffic visibility is the part you can use in a minute. The same binary provides the platform services agentic workloads need in production, as a sidecar or standalone:
- Identity & access — a verifiable identity per workload, and the right credentials for each downstream call, so an agent never holds a tool's secret. This layer is AuthBridge.
- Guardrails — block agent actions that stray from the user's intent or aren't grounded in the conversation.
- Egress control — govern which external services a workload can reach.
- Cost controls — trim the context a workload sends, and cap its spend.
Everything is a plugin in one pipeline; the plugin catalog
lists what ships, and the architecture reference explains how
a request flows through it. Code lives under authbridge/.