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Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs

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Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs

#1
Hi HN! I'm Erik. We built Butter, an LLM proxy that makes agent systems deterministic by caching and replaying responses, so automations behave consistently across runs.

- It’s a chat completions compatible endpoint, making it easy to drop into existing agents with a custom base_url

- The cache is template-aware, meaning lookups can treat dynamic content (names, addresses, etc.) as variables

You can see it in action in this demo where it memorizes tic-tac-toe games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWbyeZwPjuY

Why we built this: before Butter, we were Pig.dev (YC W25), where we built computer-use agents to automate legacy Windows applications. The goal was to replace RPA. But in practice, these agents were slow, expensive, and unpredictable - a major downgrade from deterministic RPA, and unacceptable in the worlds of healthcare, lending, and government. We realized users don't want to replace RPA with AI, they just want AI to handle the edge cases.

We set out to build a system for "muscle memory" for AI automations (general purpose, not just computer-use), where agent trajectories get baked into reusable code. You may recall our first iteration of this in May, a library called Muscle Mem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988381

Today we're relaunching it as a chat completions proxy. It emulates scripted automations by storing observed message histories in a tree structure, where each fork in the tree represents some conditional branch in the workflow's "code". We replay behaviors by walking the agent down the tree, falling back to AI to add new branches if the next step is not yet known.

The proxy is live and free to use while we work through making the template-aware engine more flexible and accurate. Please try it out and share how it went, where it breaks, and if it’s helpful.

Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs
butter.dev

Re: Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs

#7

So instead of OpenAI I should pay butter?

It’s bring-your-own-key, so any calls proxied to OpenAI just end up billing directly to your account as normal.

You’d only pay Butter for calls that don’t go to the provider. That’d be a separate billing account with butter.

Re: Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs

#9

Interesting... is it legal?

I couldn’t see how it wouldn’t be, as it’s a free market opt-in decision to use Butter

it wouldn't be the first API service to disallow someone from selling a cache layer for their API. After all, this should likely result in OpenAI (or whatever provider) making less money

Re: Show HN: Butter – A Behavior Cache for LLMs

#10

Funny, we are working to implement this same logic in our in-house financial categorization agent. When we have a repeat prompt it goes to a json that stores answers and only goes to AI for edge cases. It’s a good idea

Awesome to hear you’ve done similar. JSON artifacts from runs seem to be a common approach for building this in house, similar to what we did with the muscle mem. Detecting cache misses is a bit hard without seeing what the model sees, part of what inspired this proxy direction.

Thanks for the nice words!

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