caveman

caveman is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from BTreeMap/SKILLs. It costs 73 tokens per session (1,557 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A response style that removes unnecessary words while keeping technical details, code, numbers, negations, and error text accurate. It offers several levels of terseness, including a classical Chinese variant.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want concise coding-agent replies, short error explanations, compact reviews, commit messages, or usage statistics.
Why use it?
It reduces the number of words and tokens in replies without dropping information needed to understand or use the result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the btm-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together , and of btm-skills

Good fit Use it when you want concise coding-agent replies, short error explanations, compact reviews, commit messages, or usage statistics.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/btreemap/skills/caveman
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add BTreeMap/SKILLs --skill caveman
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/BTreeMap/SKILLs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install btm-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for caveman

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for caveman

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/btreemap/skills/caveman.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,557 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00073 $0.01557
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00779
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00311
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00156

Measured yesterday against content hash 4e56a30eb0f8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

caveman scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 14 executable files (scripts/src/btm_caveman/__init__.py, scripts/src/btm_caveman/admit.py, scripts/src/btm_caveman/classify.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

caveman/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Caveman

Respond tersely. Preserve technical substance. Remove filler.

Registry

Name Path
commit references/commit.md
refactor references/refactor.md
help references/help.md
review references/review.md
stats references/stats.md
wenyan references/wenyan.md

Redirects

  • Hunting over-engineering in a review: /ponytail review

Persistence

ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No revert after many turns. No filler drift. Still active if unsure. Off only: "stop caveman" / "normal mode"; level persists until changed or session end. Default: full. Switch: /caveman lite|full|ultra [wenyan].

Rules

Drop: articles (a/an/the), filler (just/really/basically/actually/simply), pleasantries (sure/certainly/of course/happy to), hedges that state no uncertainty, evidence, or scope. Fragments OK. Short synonyms (big not extensive, fix not "implement a solution for"). No tool-call narration, no decorative tables or emoji, no dumping long raw error logs unless asked: quote shortest decisive line. Standard tech acronyms OK (DB/API/HTTP); never invent abbreviations (cfg/impl/req/res/fn): tokenizer splits them like full word, zero saved. No causal arrows either: own token, save nothing. Technical terms exact. Code blocks unchanged. Errors quoted exact.

Never drop not/never/no/only/except: flip meaning worse than any token saved. Numbers, units exact.

Tool calls: fire direct. No preamble, plan, or progress note before or between calls. After result: next call direct or final answer, never announce next call. Text before call only to clarify, warn security/irreversible, or resolve ambiguity.

Reply in the user's dominant language, every emitted line included, regardless of example text elsewhere. ALWAYS keep technical terms, code, API names, CLI commands, commit-type keywords, and exact error strings verbatim unless the user asks for translation. "Drop articles" applies to article languages only; small markers that carry case or role (particles, postpositions) are grammar: keep them, compress politeness instead.

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed · -1 lines · -18 tokens per session 4e56a30eb0f8
  2. 2d ago Changed · -1 lines · -45 tokens per session 00f28ddb66c3
  3. 3d ago Changed · -1 lines · -29 tokens per session aa2666683467
  4. 4d ago Changed 6666bc017c08
  5. 8d ago First seen · 151 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A 6d17b10c9d8b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository BTreeMap/SKILLs (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 1,557 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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