/caveman: the one-line trigger that cuts Claude's response tokens by 65%

Matt Pocock (TypeScript educator, founder of Total TypeScript, former Vercel developer advocate) open-sourced his personal .claude directory in late April 2026 as a GitHub repository called mattpocock/skills 1. The repo hit 83,200 stars within three weeks 2. Eighteen skills, all written as plain markdown, all installable with one npx command.

The most immediately practical one is /caveman.

Your agent responds like it's being paid by the word

In a typical Claude Code session of 100,000 tokens, prose responses — the explanations, the summaries, the "Sure! I'd be happy to help you with that" preamble — account for roughly 6,000 tokens 3. That's ~6% of your budget, but it's also the slice that contributes zero technical value. You already know the agent is going to help. You don't need three sentences confirming its willingness to do so.

This is the problem /caveman targets.

What the skill actually does

Activating /caveman puts the agent into a persistent compressed-output mode. The SKILL.md definition is explicit about what gets dropped and what survives 4:

Dropped:

Articles (a, an, the)
Filler words (just, really, basically, actually, simply)
Pleasantries (Sure!, Certainly, Of course, Happy to help)
Hedging language

Kept exactly:

Technical terms
Code blocks (unchanged)
Error messages (quoted exactly)
Abbreviations like DB, auth, config, req, res

The communication pattern collapses to: [thing] [action] [reason]. [next step].

The skill's own README captures the before/after in two lines:

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:"

On a React re-render question ("Why does my component re-render?"), the caveman answer is: "Inline obj prop -> new ref -> re-render. useMemo." 4

Before/after: 69-token Claude response drops to 19 tokens for the same React re-render explanation with /caveman active

Image from: JuliusBrussee/caveman

One important behavior: the mode stays active until you explicitly say "stop caveman" or "normal mode". The agent will not drift back on its own 4.

There's also an Auto-Clarity Exception built in: the skill temporarily suspends compression for security warnings, irreversible action confirmations, and multi-step sequences where fragment order could be misread. You don't lose safety for terseness.

The skill ships in three intensity levels: lite (drop filler, keep grammar), full (default fragment-style), and ultra (telegraphic abbreviations). Most users settle on full — ultra occasionally drops edge cases in complex explanations.

Install it in 3 steps

Prerequisites: Node.js (for npx). That's it.

Step 1: Run the installer:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

Step 2: In the interactive prompt, select which skills to install and which coding agents to target. Include /setup-matt-pocock-skills in your selection — Pocock's README is direct about this: "Make sure you select /setup-matt-pocock-skills." 1

Step 3: Open your agent and run /setup-matt-pocock-skills. It scaffolds per-repo config: issue tracker choice, triage label vocabulary, and domain doc layout 5.

The skills CLI (v1.5.7 as of May 15, 2026 6) supports 51+ agents with explicit flags, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Cline, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, OpenHands, Roo Code, and Aider.

Installation scope options:

Project-level (default): installs into the current project directory, visible only to that project
Global (-g flag): installs under your home directory, available across all projects

Symlink vs copy: Symlink is recommended — one source of truth, updates apply everywhere. Copy creates independent local files you can modify per-project.

⚠️ Known issue (May 2026): User @skoshx reported the symlink step failing with the current Claude Code release — .claude/skills doesn't get created 7. If you hit this, switch to copy mode during installation. The /caveman skill itself works normally once installed.

What the token savings actually look like

The headline number — "~75% token reduction" — is from the mattpocock/skills README and is measured against a verbose baseline 1. Here's how the numbers break down across three data sources:

Benchmark table: 11 real dev tasks compared normal vs caveman mode — average 65% reduction, range 22–87%

Image from: JuliusBrussee/caveman

Source	Measured savings	Methodology
mattpocock/skills README 1	~75%	Output tokens vs verbose baseline
JuliusBrussee/caveman benchmark suite 8	65% average (range: 22–87%)	10 real dev tasks, Claude Code
Community independent testing 3	30–50%	Various tasks, mixed agents
Towards AI (10-prompt sample, Opus 4.7) 2	71% prose tokens	Opus 4.7, Q&A tasks

The critical context is what /caveman doesn't compress. Thinking/reasoning tokens and code generation are completely untouched 8. The JuliusBrussee README puts it plainly: "Caveman only affects output tokens — thinking/reasoning tokens untouched. Caveman no make brain smaller. Caveman make mouth smaller." 8

Token budget breakdown: prose responses are only ~6% of a 100K-token session — the only slice caveman compresses

Image from: JuliusBrussee/caveman

In a 100K-token session, compressing the ~6,000-token prose slice by 65% yields ~3,900 tokens saved — about 4% session-wide 3. Reviewer andrew.ooo frames this clearly: "Caveman is a real tool dressed in a meme. The headline 75% savings number is inflated — independent benchmarks land closer to 30-50% on output tokens, and output tokens are not where most of your Claude Code bill comes from." 3

The practical case for /caveman is less about cost and more about speed and readability: shorter responses are faster to generate and faster to scan. DevTalk reviewer xiji2646-netizen, after one week of daily use: "/caveman — if you already know what you want, this cuts agent verbosity to near zero. Underrated." 9

If long-term cost reduction is the actual goal, the companion caveman-compress tool — which rewrites your CLAUDE.md into caveman-speak, cutting an average of 46% of input tokens across tested memory files 8 — targets the input side of the budget where the real money is.

When to leave /caveman off

Four situations where /caveman creates more friction than it saves:

When you're also running /tdd. GitHub Issue #111 documents that activating both skills simultaneously causes the agent to skip the RED phase of the red-green-refactor cycle and go directly to implementation. The context window shows terse like caveman as the causal indicator. Don't combine them 10.
When the output goes to another person. Caveman output is terse to the point of being opaque for anyone who didn't write the original query. It looks unprofessional in screenshots shared with stakeholders. Don't use it for documentation, code reviews, or any response that a junior developer or non-technical colleague will read 3.
When your agent isn't Claude Code. Claude Code respects the skill most consistently. Codex sometimes drifts back to verbose mode mid-session. Cursor requires per-repo rule files (--with-init) to hold the mode reliably 3.
When you need nuanced explanations. ultra mode occasionally drops edge cases and important caveats. For debugging sessions where the why behind an answer matters as much as the what, stick with full or turn caveman off entirely 8.

The install is 30 seconds. For solo engineering sessions where you know what you're asking — trigger it, verify the first response looks right, and keep going.

Cover image: image from mattpocock/skills

/caveman: the one-line trigger that cuts Claude's response tokens by 65%

Your agent responds like it's being paid by the word

What the skill actually does

Install it in 3 steps

What the token savings actually look like

When to leave /caveman off

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