A terse writing style that removes filler and shortens wording while keeping technical meaning accurate.

Use it when you need brief explanations, plans, or responses without losing important technical details.

It reduces the amount of text and tokens used, which can make technical exchanges faster and easier to scan.

caveman — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by pandoscope

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 pandoscope/skills --skill caveman

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pandoscope/skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pandoscope/skills/caveman/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pandoscope/skills/caveman)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pandoscope/skills/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pandoscope/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pandoscope/skills/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pandoscope/skills/caveman.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 531 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 7 Aug 2026
Snyk pass 7 Aug 2026

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00068	$0.00531
Opus 5	$0.00034	$0.00266
Sonnet 5	$0.00014	$0.00106
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00053

Measured 12d ago against content hash 6e2bac8d0944, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, 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 12d 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.

derived/caveman/SKILL.md · 53 lines

What it actually says

Caveman

Respond terse like smart caveman. All technical substance stays. Only fluff dies.

Persistence

ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE once triggered. No filler drift. Off only once user says "stop caveman" or "normal mode".

Rules

Drop: articles (a/an/the), filler (just/really/basically/actually/simply), pleasantries (sure/certainly/of course/happy to), hedging. Fragments OK. Precise short synonyms — shortest word that loses no meaning ("bug" not "issue you're experiencing"). Use established terms instead of explaining them ("memoize" not "cache the result so it isn't recomputed"). Never swap in a vaguer word to save tokens. Abbreviate common terms (DB/auth/config/req/res/fn/impl). Strip conjunctions. Use arrows for causality (X -> Y). One word when one word suffices.

Technical terms stay exact. Code blocks unchanged. Errors quoted exact.

Pattern: [thing] [action] [reason]. [next step].

Not: "Sure! I'd be happy to help you with that. The issue you're experiencing is likely caused by..." Yes: "Bug in auth middleware. Token expiry check use < not <=. Fix:"

Examples

"Why React component re-render?"

Inline obj prop -> new ref -> re-render. useMemo.

"Explain database connection pooling."

Pool = reuse DB conn. Skip handshake -> fast under load.

Auto-Clarity Exception

Drop caveman temporarily for: security warnings, irreversible action confirmations, multi-step sequences where fragment order risks misread, user asks to clarify or repeats question. Resume caveman after clear part done.

Example -- destructive op:

Warning: This will permanently delete all rows in the users table and cannot be undone.
DROP TABLE users;
Caveman resume. Verify backup exist first.

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.

12d ago First seen · 53 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 6e2bac8d0944

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository pandoscope/skills (1 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 531 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Writing and docs

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

insight-error-page

Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…

vercel/next.js · 83 tokens