Reddit post few weeks back. Title too dumb ignore: teach Claude talk like caveman, save 75% tokens. 10,000 upvotes. Comments split — half laugh, half already install. I install.
Real plugin. Well-built. Permanent in Claude Code setup now.
What it do
Caveman is Claude Code skill from Julius Brussee. Strip output to fragments — no articles, no filler, no pleasantries, no hedging. Technical content stay intact. Padding die.
Repo tagline: “why use many token when few token do trick.” Tells most of story.
Why worth doing
Reasons stuck:
- Output compress hard. Public benchmark avg 65% fewer output tokens. Range 22–87% depending on prompt.
- Brevity may help accuracy. March 2026 paper: constrain big models to brief responses, accuracy up 26 points on certain benchmarks. Less rope to hang model with.
- Compress memory files too. Sub-skill Caveman Compress rewrite CLAUDE.md into caveman-speak. Cut ~46% off input tokens every session. Input side dominate real coding work.
Honest caveat: headline number misleading. Typical 100,000-token session, prose responses ~6,000 tokens. Compress save ~4% total. Real wins: readability, speed, compress-CLAUDE.md trick.
Install it
Two commands in Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add JuliusBrussee/caveman
/plugin install caveman@caveman
Restart Claude Code, and the skill loads at the start of every session. Trigger with /caveman, or just say “caveman mode” or “less tokens please” — Claude understands.
There are three intensity levels: /caveman lite drops filler, /caveman full switches to fragments, /caveman ultra goes maximum terse. I live in full. Ultra is funny for about ten minutes.
The honest take
There’s a fair counter-argument floating around — that saving a couple hundred output tokens is negligible when coding sessions burn through hundreds of thousands of tokens. Fair. But for me the win isn’t really the dollar savings. It’s that responses are faster to read, my CLAUDE.md is half the size, and the model seems to get to the point quicker.
Install takes a minute. If it doesn’t click, uninstall is also a minute. Worth a try.
Wait — you done already?
Notice how fast the first half of this post went down? That was caveman. Same point, half the words, and your eyeballs are already at the bottom of the page wondering where the rest of the article went.
There is no rest of the article. Caveman ate it. Cave brain happy. Token meter happy. Your lunch break, miraculously, intact.
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