'caveman' Claude Code Skill Hits 54k+ Stars by Making Agents Talk Like Cavemen to Cut Output Tokens

GitHub·high signal

JuliusBrussee/caveman rocketed to 54,000+ GitHub stars in under three weeks (and #1 on Hacker News) as a skill/plugin — also packaged for Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, and Copilot — that strips agent verbosity (no 'I'd be happy to help' preamble) while keeping code blocks, error strings, and symbols exact. The project advertises ~65% average output reduction across 10 prompts (range 22-87%), though independent benchmarks land closer to 30-50%.