This smells heavily of astroturfing. Particularly because Headroom is a paid product, and that fact is not mentioned here or in the GitHub README.
Here was my experience…
I download and run the Mac application, which starts installing a bunch of things. Then the following happens without advance notice:
- Adds background item(s) from "Idiosyncratocracy BV"
- Downloads over 2 GB of files
- Pollutes home with ~/.headroom directory
- Adds hook(s) to ~/.claude/hooks/
- Modifies your ~/.claude/settings.json to add above hook(s)
… and then I see something in the settings that talks about creating an account. That's when I realized that this is a paid product, after all of the above has happened.
Headroom seems to use https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk under the hood. What does Headroom offer over the actually-free RTK? Who knows.
At this point I have had it with this subterfuge — I immediately trash the app and every related file and folder I can find, of which there are many. Hopefully I got them all, but who knows. There should have been an easy way to uninstall this mess, but of course there isn't.
The lack of transparency here is really concerning.
Thanks for the feedback, will work on making this more transparent so future users do not have this experience.
I did want to call out that headroom is not based on RTK - it includes RTK sure, but headroom cli has a lot more going on under the hood. For more see https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom
I installed Headroom to give it a try, quickly decided to uninstall when I realized how invasive it is and requires a subscription. Spent the next few hours having issues with CC where it was asking for permission on every command. It was using absolute paths for all commands - turns out it was running into `zsh: command not found: rtk`. To fully uninstall I had to:
Thanks for sharing your experiences. We incorporated changes in the latest version to improve this:
1. On install we explain what Headroom installs
2. We added an uninstall feature that removes all of this for you
3. On quit of the app, we immediately remove all items that may intervene with normal Claude Code behavior
Headroom looks great for client-side trimming. If you want to tackle this at the infrastructure level, we built Edgee (https://www.edgee.ai) as an AI Gateway that handles context compression, caching, and token budgeting across requests, so you're not relying on each client to do the right thing.
(I work at Edgee, so biased, but happy to answer questions.)
Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective! I’ll do some more digging into the Orbi systems.
In my experience buying a product that gets mostly positive reviews from professional reviewers gets you a far better product than one with mixed reviews. I’m surprised that’s not your experience and that you don’t much trust those scores. What else do you make your purchase decisions on then? Purely specs?
The best ones write in depth reviews, describe their thinking process and fairly weigh pros / cons.
Ultimately it’s imo more about avoiding bad products than it is about noticing whether a product is great. Criticaster collects all professional reviews to get to an average critic score, which will more quickly and more accurately get you to a satisfactory product than any other approach.
for a long time whenever you did a search for "Best X" Google always sent you to a short list of spammy review sites. Google kicked most of them to the curb but for some reason left the Wirecutter.
Before Google decided to hand the keys to Forbes though there was a vibrant market in competitive spammy sites for topics like that but at one point Google decided that Forbes and The Wirecutter should win all the time so since then we've had uncompetitive spammy sites and no way you can make a better spammy site and win market share.
It analyzes thousands of professional critic reviews to find the best of the best.
I started building this because I adore how metacritic analyzes professional movie/game/tv show reviews and calculates a meta score for each title. In my experience it’s the best way to discover new things to watch or play, and I’ve often wished something like this would exist for when I want to buy a product.
This year, I decided to start building it myself and Criticaster is the result.
For a given product category we collect all professional reviews of a given product, analyze each to assign them a score and then calculate an average critic score.
The goal is to become the most trustworthy source to make product decisions.
Your comment is probably tongue in cheek, but this level of detail is pretty standard for advanced cooking. Serious Eats, Chef Steps or What’s Eating Dan have published loads of recipes backed up by research and accompanied by great graphs.
Thanks for the great questions! Find answers below, let me know if you have any further questions :-)
1. Our issuing partner is Brale.xyz, a US regulated stablecoin company by Ben Milne, the founder of Dwolla. Brale works with partners on their end to invest in US Treasuries. More info here: https://www.glodollar.org/articles/brale-and-the-glo-foundat...
On audits: we're working with a big 4 auditor on audit readiness. Our goal is to publish audits regularly and be fully transparent in both our operations and treasury holdings. Brale will publish monthly attestations of the assets backing Glo Dollar, and we will have audit rights over those assets on a periodical basis as well.
2. While US Treasuries indeed have a maturity date, treasuries with a maturity date of up to 3 months are considered a "cash equivalent" because their market is so liquid. Because of this, they can easily be exchanged for cash in the event a lot of people want their cash back at once.
3. Glo's per-dollar impact is low at first. As adoption grows, it ramps up. At scale, we expect to lift 1 person out of extreme poverty per $20,000 of Glo Dollar market cap by generating approximately $480 in interest that we can donate to GiveDirectly. We're not there yet, as we need to ramp up market cap beyond $2m first. More info here: https://www.glodollar.org/articles/from-bootstrap-to-high-im...
4. Stablecoins provide actual utility to crypto traders (hence why there are $125B of them in circulation). So our thinking is that we can drive adoption by meeting traders where they are. We also think that Glo Dollar’s philanthropic mission will give it an edge for IRL stablecoin adoption. More on that here: https://www.glodollar.org/articles/vision-and-growth-strateg...
https://github.com/gglucass/headroom-desktop (mac app)
https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom (cli)
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