Stop feeding raw documents to your LLM
Every time you drop a PDF or Word doc into a model, you pay tokens for formatting it never reasons over. Layout, styling, table scaffolding. None of it earns its place in the context window.
So I built to-md.
It turns .pdf, .docx, .pptx and .xlsx into Markdown, and writes two files: a faithful one, and a lean one stripped to the minimal text. The lean file is the one you paste in.
One engine, three ways in: a command line tool, a Finder right-click action (Adds the path of the lean file to your clipboard too), and a Claude Code skill that fires the moment you hand it a document.
The principle underneath it: the model should only read what it has to think about. The rest is waste you are paying for.
Pre-process the document. Then prompt.
//A<3
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Ari Evergreen
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Stop feeding raw documents to your LLM
Clief Notes
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Jake Van Clief, giving you the Cliff notes on the new AI age.
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