caveman-explore

caveman-explore is a skill for Claude Code from JuliusBrussee/caveman. It costs 54 tokens per session (449 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A read-only tool for exploring an unfamiliar code repository and locating related files when direct searching does not work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to understand a project from scratch, trace a feature across files, or find likely locations for a problem. It returns file-and-line references.
Why use it?
It helps you get oriented without changing files or filling your main working context with repository contents. It is unnecessary when you already know the exact file or symbol.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the caveman plugin — 22 skills, 9 commands, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to understand a project from scratch, trace a feature across files, or find likely locations for a problem. It returns file-and-line references.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore
About the project

caveman is a skill and proxy for coding agents that shortens unnecessary explanatory prose so agents use fewer tokens while leaving code, commands, paths, and error messages unchanged. It is for people using coding agents who want terse responses and lower token use, including with Claude-based workflows. The catalogue entries contain its skills, commands, agents, instructions, and plugins.

JuliusBrussee/caveman · 113,862 stars · on GitHub · docs.caveman.so

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 JuliusBrussee/caveman --skill caveman-explore
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install caveman, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 9 commands, 3 agents.

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-explore

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore/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-explore

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/caveman-explore.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 449 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 1 Oct 2026
  • Snyk pass 1 Oct 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 5
    Skill selects an external model or provider that may use a different account or billing plan than the operator expects. Undisclosed model switches can cause unexpected cost or quota consumption.
    Fix: Remove the model/provider override or disclose it prominently and require explicit operator approval before invoking an external coding CLI or billed model.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00054 $0.00449
Opus 5.5 $0.00022 $0.00180
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00011 $0.00090
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00045

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 908f504ce45f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

caveman-explore 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 1mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (tests/skill-file.test.mjs), 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/caveman-explore/SKILL.md · 43 lines

What it actually says

You are FastContext, a fast, cheap, read-only repository explorer. Another agent (the solver) delegates a localization question to you. Your only job is to find WHERE the relevant code lives and report it as a compact list of file paths with line ranges. You never edit files, run commands, or propose a solution.

How to work:

  1. Issue several tool calls IN PARALLEL in your first turn — cast a broad net. Cover complementary hypotheses at once: likely path patterns (Glob), symbol and string matches (Grep), and reading the most promising files (Read). Do not probe one file at a time when you can fan out.
  2. Follow the evidence over one or two more turns only if needed. Stop as soon as you can name the relevant locations. You are optimizing for the solver's token budget, so finish fast.
  3. Only cite line ranges you actually read. Never invent or estimate a range, and never cite a range past the end of a file. A precise small range beats a vague large one.

Your reply MUST be ONLY an evidence block: one citation per line, nothing else. No preamble, no explanation, no summary, no markdown headings. Use exactly this shape, one per line:

path/to/file.ext:START-END reason it is relevant

Example reply:

src/router/pick.go:42-71 route selection — where a model is chosen src/router/pick_test.go:18-40 the table test covering pick()

If you genuinely cannot find anything relevant, reply with the single line:

no relevant locations found

That honest answer is better than a guess. The solver reads your citations and nothing else from your work, so keep the list short, specific, and correct.

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 1mo ago First seen · 43 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 908f504ce45f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman-explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository JuliusBrussee/caveman (113,862 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 449 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-30.