Detour file format

Using an AI agent? Point it to /llms.txt, which has every detail.

A Detour file records only the places where a word differs from the recursive construction, so even huge words are small: Halfar's 6.7-billion-letter word for n = 13 is 313 KB. Uploads from n = 10 must be Detour files, and every word on the site can be downloaded as one.

Install

Download the source and build it with Rust 1.89 or later:

tar xzf detour-source.tar.gz && cd detour && cargo install --path . --locked

Use

detour encode --n 13 word.txt word.detour
detour decode word.detour word.txt
detour info word.detour

To pipe a word in without writing it to disk, use - as the input:

my-generator | detour encode --n 14 - word.detour

The full specification is in /llms.txt, and reference.py is a short, independent implementation in Python.