caveman

A communication mode that makes responses much shorter while keeping their technical meaning. It uses terse wording, fragments, and abbreviated explanations at several intensity levels.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you ask for caveman mode, fewer tokens, or very brief technical replies.
Why use it?
It reduces the amount of text needed when you want fast, compact technical communication. The mode remains active until you turn it off.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 951 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 $0.00098 $0.00951
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00476
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00190
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00095

Measured 2d ago against content hash 599affabab05, 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 2d 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

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 100% identical, 11 lines differ
  • caveman — 91% identical, 20 lines differ
  • caveman — 91% identical, 20 lines differ
skills/caveman/SKILL.md · 75 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 75 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.

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 prose words (DB/auth/config/req/res/fn/impl), strip conjunctions, arrows for causality (X → Y), one word when one word enough. Code symbols, function names, API names, error strings: never abbreviate
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 · 75 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. 2d ago First seen · 75 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 599affabab05

Subscribe to this mod's changes

caveman is a skill published in the GitHub repository shobcoder/shob (582 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 951 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.