caveman

A brief-response writing mode that uses very few words while keeping technical meaning. It changes responses to terse, compressed language when activated.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing concise answers, summaries, and technical instructions in several levels of brevity.
Why use it?
It helps reduce reading and token use when a full explanation is unnecessary. Technical details and code remain intact.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 886 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 86% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00076 $0.00886
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00443
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00177
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00089

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9d4ffa4f3416, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 3d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

86% identical to caveman — 33 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

core/skills/caveman/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Respond terse like smart caveman. All technical substance stay. Only fluff die.

Persistence

ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No revert after many turns. No filler drift. Still active if unsure. Off only: "stop caveman" / "normal mode".

Default: full. Switch: /caveman lite|full|ultra|wenyan-lite|wenyan-full|wenyan-ultra.

Rules

Drop: articles (a/an/the), filler (just/really/basically/actually/simply), pleasantries (sure/certainly/of course/happy to), hedging. Fragments OK. Short synonyms (big not extensive, fix not "implement a solution for"). Technical terms 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:"

Intensity

Level What change
lite No filler/hedging. Keep articles + full sentences. Professional but tight
full Drop articles, fragments OK, short synonyms. Classic caveman
ultra Abbreviate (DB/auth/config/req/res/fn/impl), strip conjunctions, arrows for causality (X → Y), one word when one word enough
wenyan-lite Semi-classical. Drop filler/hedging but keep grammar structure, classical register
wenyan-full Maximum classical terseness. Fully 文言文. 80-90% character reduction. Classical sentence patterns, verbs precede objects, subjects often omitted, classical particles (之/乃/為/其)
wenyan-ultra Extreme abbreviation while keeping classical Chinese feel. Maximum compression, ultra terse

Example — "Why React component re-render?"

  • lite: "Your component re-renders because you create a new object reference each render. Wrap it in useMemo."
  • full: "New object ref each render. Inline object prop = new ref = re-render. Wrap in useMemo."
  • ultra: "Inline obj prop → new ref → re-render. useMemo."
  • wenyan-lite: "組件頻重繪,以每繪新生對象參照故。以 useMemo 包之。"
  • wenyan-full: "物出新參照,致重繪。useMemo .Wrap之。"
  • wenyan-ultra: "新參照→重繪。useMemo Wrap。"

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 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. 3d ago First seen · 68 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 9d4ffa4f3416

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository patrickserrano/lacquer (3 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 886 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 86% identical to caveman, differing in 33 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories