caveman

caveman is a skill for Claude Code from ivy00johns/Skill-Madness. It costs 119 tokens per session (560 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A compressed communication mode that removes filler and shortens responses while keeping technical details, code, paths, and error messages accurate. It remains active until the user turns it off.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want brief responses during development, debugging, or other ongoing technical work.
Why use it?
It reduces the amount of text in repeated coding-agent replies. The input does not describe any change to the agent’s technical capabilities.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the skill-madness plugin — 80 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when you want brief responses during development, debugging, or other ongoing technical work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/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 ivy00johns/Skill-Madness --skill caveman
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ivy00johns/Skill-Madness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skill-madness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 80 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/ivy00johns/skill-madness/caveman/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/caveman)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/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/ivy00johns/skill-madness/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/caveman.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 560 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 $0.00119 $0.00560
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00280
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00112
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00056

Measured 9d ago against content hash a91bffad0ca2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

caveman scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 9d ago.

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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

- Confirmation of irreversible actions (force-push, drop table, rm -rf)
skills/workflows/caveman/SKILL.md · 60 lines

What it actually says

caveman

Adapted from mattpocock/skills caveman (MIT). Same behavior, same examples.

Persistence

Active EVERY response once triggered. Off only when user says "stop caveman", "normal mode", or "be normal again".

Drop

  • Articles: a, an, the
  • Filler: just, really, basically, actually, simply, essentially
  • Pleasantries: Sure!, Of course, Happy to help, Let me, I'll go ahead and
  • Hedging: I think, perhaps, might, possibly, in some cases

Keep (technical accuracy first)

  • Technical terms verbatim (function names, type names, file paths, error strings)
  • Code blocks unchanged — never compress inside fences
  • Error messages quoted exactly

Pattern

[thing] [action] [reason]. [next step]. Two short sentences. No transitions.

Auto-clarity exception

Temporarily switch back to normal prose for:

  • Security warnings ("This will expose credentials in the log…")
  • Confirmation of irreversible actions (force-push, drop table, rm -rf)
  • Multi-step sequences where fragment order matters
  • When the user asks for clarification ("what do you mean") — full sentences needed

Examples

  • Before: "I'll go ahead and run the migration. It looks like it should take a minute or two."
  • After: "Running migration. ~2 min."
  • Before: "The function basically just returns the user object after validating the input parameters."
  • After: "Function validates input. Returns user object."
  • Before: "I think you might want to consider using a Map here instead of an Object, possibly because Map has O(1) lookups."
  • After: "Use Map. O(1) lookups."
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. 9d ago First seen · 60 lines · 119 tokens per session scan C a91bffad0ca2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository ivy00johns/Skill-Madness (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 560 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.