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Julius Brussee avatar

Caveman

Token-cutting skill and local proxy that makes coding agents terse

  • AI coding agents
  • Agent skills and plugins
View on GitHub
Website

What it is

Caveman shortens what AI coding agents write and read: a skill makes replies terse while leaving code, commands, and errors verbatim, and a local proxy compresses logs, JSON, test output, and web pages before the model sees them. It also adds per-request model selection and reusable agent scripts to lower cost. Developers running Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and other agents install it with one npx command to cut token spend on their own keys.

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Facts

Stars
113,794 GitHub stars.
113,794

Forks
6,585
Commits
1,822
Contributors
90
Language
Go
License
Apache-2.0
Last commit
Oct 17, 2026
On GitHub since
April 2026
First release
April 2026
Platforms
macOS, Windows, Linux, CLI
Self-hostable
No
Author
Julius Brussee
Tags
  • agent-skills
  • coding-agent
  • context-engineering
  • prompt-engineering
  • proxy

Last synced from GitHub on Oct 20, 2026

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What people are saying

Updated Oct 21, 2026
  • Hacker NewsCaveman: Why use many token when few token do trickApr 5, 2026 · 904 points · 366 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Claude speak short. You save money. Me like.”Apr 12, 2026 · 7 likes · 3 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“You might enjoy this: (for some value of "enjoy")”May 25, 2026 · 2 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsRespond terse like smart caveman. All technical substance stay. Only fluff dieSep 10, 2026 · 2 points · 0 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“repo: enough said bye”Apr 27, 2026 · 2 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsCaveman – why use many token when few do trickApr 16, 2026 · 2 points · 0 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Most teams don’t have a model quality problem — they have a signal-to-noise problem. If your AI output is verbose, your review loop gets slower and more…”Apr 14, 2026 · 2 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“I also wonder how seriously I should consider something like”Jul 13, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“5. Caveman. instructs the model to drop articles and polite openers. Blunt, exact, up to 75% token savings in output only.”Jul 9, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Coding workflow: 1. Have Anthropic's Opus family design a feature or fix as a set of beads issues: 2. Using either Anthropic's Sonnet family or GLM 4.7 (an…”Jun 17, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“He also shared some AI resources some of you might find handy! CLAUDE.md file to improve Claude Code behavior bridge between an LLM and a local codebase for…”May 9, 2026 · 1 like · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“That was the input side. Now the output side. There's a skill on GitHub called Caveman. It tells Claude to stop over-explaining and just answer. You don't…”Apr 17, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“This is what I love most about open source, and the internet. Pure magic! Thank you Julius.”Jul 6, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“This repo has 62k stars. Compare with Ruby on Rails, which has 58k. More people want to talk to a caveman AI than use a web framework.”May 20, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Reading about the 文言文 (Wenyan) Mode from this Claude caveman skill”Apr 22, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)