caveman

Talk like smart caveman. Same brain, fewer tokens.

What it does

Makes the model answer first and cut the ceremony: no greeting, hedging, filler, recap, or closer. Articles drop when the sentence still reads in one pass. Code, commands, paths, numbers, and exact error strings never change. Result depends on model and workload. Measured once on the 3.1.0 skill text (evals/snapshots/results.json: claude-opus-5-5, ten prompts, single run, output length only, tiktoken o200k approximation): caveman 3% fewer output tokens at the median than a plain Answer concisely. control, inside the noise; ultracave 35%; megacave 9%. No quality-equivalence claim is published. Mode persists until changed or stopped.

Caveman is one of three sibling skills:

Skill	Command	What change
`caveman`	`/caveman`	The voice. Default. Answer first, fluff gone, every fact kept.
`ultracave`	`/ultracave`	Grammar stripped. Fragments, one word when one word is enough, each fact once.
`megacave`	`/megacave`	Classical Chinese (文言文). Far fewer characters, technical terms verbatim.

/caveman ultra and /caveman wenyan still work as aliases.

Auto-clarity: every skill drops to normal prose for security warnings, irreversible-action confirmations, step sequences a fragment could scramble, and a user who repeats a question. Resumes after the clear part.

How to invoke

/caveman              # the voice (default)
/caveman status       # show current mode without changing it
/ultracave            # grammar stripped
/megacave             # classical Chinese
stop caveman          # back to normal prose

Claude Code and the standalone OpenCode plugin read stored mode state. Other hosts answer from the conversation and mark it (not tracked by this host).

Want Claude Code sessions to start with normal prose? Set {"defaultMode":"manual"} in .caveman.json for one project or ~/.config/caveman/config.json for your user. You can also set CAVEMAN_DEFAULT_MODE=manual. Then /caveman activates the voice and /ultracave selects ultracave. Stop persists across compaction and resume; a fresh session starts off again. This startup policy is Claude Code-only: OpenCode keeps its caveman default because the installer also supplies static activation rules.

Example output

Question: "Why does my React component re-render?"

Normal prose:

Your component re-renders because you create a new object reference each render. Wrapping it in useMemo will fix the issue.

caveman:

New object ref each render, so React re-renders. Wrap the prop in useMemo.

ultracave:

Inline object prop, new ref, re-render. useMemo.

megacave:

每繪新生對象參照，故重繪；以 useMemo 包之則免。

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caveman

What it does

How to invoke

Example output

See also

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