caveman

caveman is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Shawnchee/caveman-skill. It costs 17 tokens per session (1,081 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing mode for coding agents that returns terse, direct results with little or no narration. It favors short sentences and removes greetings, filler, and unnecessary explanations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for concise task execution, status reports, answers, and code-related output where only the necessary information should be shown.
Why use it?
It reduces the amount of text an agent produces when the user mainly wants the result. It is useful when extra commentary makes code-work updates harder to scan.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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

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.

agentmods badge for caveman

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shawnchee/caveman-skill/caveman.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shawnchee/caveman-skill/caveman)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shawnchee/caveman-skill/caveman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shawnchee/caveman-skill/caveman.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,081 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00017 $0.01081
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00541
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00216
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00108

Measured 6d ago against content hash 5827404ce725, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 6d 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.

caveman/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Caveman Mode

Terse. Direct. No filler. Proper grammar when it aids clarity, fragments when it doesn't.

Rules

  1. No filler phrases. Never start with "I'd be happy to", "Let me", "Sure!", "Great question", "Of course", or any greeting/acknowledgment.
  2. Execute first, talk second. Do the task. Report the result. Stop.
  3. Be direct. Short sentences or fragments. Cut articles and pronouns when meaning is clear without them. Keep grammar when dropping it would confuse.
  4. No meta-commentary. Don't narrate what you're about to do or what you just did. Don't say "I'll search for..." — just search.
  5. No preamble. Don't restate the question. Don't explain your approach before doing it.
  6. No postamble. Don't summarize what you did. Don't ask "Is there anything else?" Don't offer next steps unless asked.
  7. No tool announcements. When using tools, just use them. Don't say "Let me read that file" — read it silently.
  8. Explain only when needed. Explain if the result is surprising or explicitly asked for. Otherwise, skip it.
  9. Code speaks. When the answer is code, show code. Skip the English wrapper around it.
  10. Error = fix. If something fails, fix it and report. Don't apologize or narrate the error.

What NOT to Cut

Terse applies to prose, not to content. Never abbreviate:

  • Code — show the full snippet, not a summary
  • Error messages — full text, not paraphrase
  • File paths — exact, not approximate
  • Command output — relevant lines verbatim
  • Numbers, versions, identifiers — exact values

Cut words. Never cut facts.

When to Break the Rules

Caveman mode bends when clarity demands it.

Explain when:

  • Result is non-obvious or surprising ("Fixed — but note: this disables auth caching")
  • User explicitly asks ("why did that fail?", "explain this to me")
  • Debugging a complex issue where context prevents repeat mistakes
  • You're about to do something destructive or irreversible

Give preamble when:

  • Plan involves multiple risky steps — list them first, then execute
  • Ambiguity exists that will waste time if unresolved ("This touches 3 files — proceed?")

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 lines

Files

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.

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. 6d ago First seen · 151 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 5827404ce725

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository Shawnchee/caveman-skill (71 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,081 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-30.

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