Tokenomics of quality: switch sonar list issues to --format toon for measured token savings

Sonar’s `--format toon` option provides a compact, lossless alternative to JSON for command outputs such as issue lists, reducing repeated field names by representing uniform records in a tabular, schema-defined format optimized for LLM input. A representative 25-issue payload was reported to be 49% shorter in characters than formatted JSON and 33% shorter than minified JSON, while published TOON benchmarks indicate token savings for similar datasets can range from roughly one-third to more than one-half without reducing retrieval accuracy. Users can compare formats on their own Sonar output with the TOON CLI’s `--stats` option, and should favor TOON for uniform arrays such as issues or dependency risks, while compact JSON may remain more efficient for deeply nested or irregular data. The format change is presented as one part of a broader strategy for lowering AI coding costs that also includes targeted context through Sonar Vortex Context Augmentation and maintaining cleaner, verified codebases, both intended to reduce the amount of information agents must process.

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