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.
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.
npx skills add JuliusBrussee/caveman --skill surgical-patchgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/cavemanWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/surgical-patch)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/surgical-patch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/surgical-patch/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/surgical-patch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/surgical-patch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00034 | $0.00120 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00014 | $0.00048 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00024 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00012 |
Grade A, and why
surgical-patch 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.
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.
Copies of this mod
2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- surgical-patch — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- surgical-patch — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
What it actually says
Surgical patch
Reproduce failure first when economical; otherwise capture strongest available evidence.
- Trace symptom to responsible mechanism.
- Change narrowest layer that owns incorrect behavior.
- Preserve unrelated behavior and user changes.
- Avoid cleanup, renaming, and abstraction outside fix.
- Add only regression proof relevant to task.
Run focused proof plus nearest affected gate. Stop when failure is fixed and regression proof passes.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 17 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 81ea9f7b5140
surgical-patch is a skill published in the GitHub repository JuliusBrussee/caveman (113,862 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 120 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.
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