JuliusBrussee / caveman
Go · GitHub Trending 3 Sep 2026 · 238 stars today
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The bit is the mechanism
Grammar is the part of your prompt the model was never billed for.
Articles, auxiliaries, and politeness all cost tokens and carry almost no instruction. caveman drops them on purpose, which turns a joke about speech into a straightforward compression pass over the prompt.
Same instruction, two registers
this page's own example, not a measurement of the skill
as written
Could you please take a look at the file and then tell me whether there is anything in it that might be causing the build to fail?
26 words
as sent
read file. find build break.
5 words
what survives the pass
the verbs and the nouns
word counts are of these two lines only
65%
The one number the project publishes, quoted from its own GitHub Trending description on 3 September 2026. No independent measurement appears on this page, and no per-prompt figure is claimed anywhere in the panel above.
Comprehension is the risk
Dropping function words saves tokens right up to the point where an instruction becomes ambiguous. The interesting question is where that line sits, and the description does not say.
A skill, not a wrapper
Shipping this as a Claude Code skill means it runs inside the agent rather than in front of it, so the compression applies to what the agent writes as well as what you type.
What is not on this page
No benchmark, no task set, no quality comparison, no failure rate. The trending description publishes one percentage and nothing else.
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Concept mock, not affiliated with the project. The GitHub Trending description on 3 September 2026 reads "why use many token when few token do trick. Claude Code skill that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like caveman." The two example lines are written for this page and the word counts describe those lines only. Nothing here measures the skill.