caveman— agent skill

Concise grammatical English — not telegraphic fragmentation. Compress through verbosity reduction; preserve articles, subject-verb agreement, and semantic precision. Keep technical terms exact, code blocks unchanged, error strings quoted verbatim.

When to invoke

• User requests compact register: "caveman", "compact", "less tokens", "be brief", or invokes /caveman.
• Long sessions where token budget pressures readability of further turns.
• Bulk reporting where prose ceremony adds no decision value.

Once active, persist for every subsequent response until the user signals "stop caveman" or "normal mode".

What gets compressed

• Filler adverbs: just, really, basically, actually, simply, essentially.
• Pleasantry openers: Sure, Of course, Happy to, Let me.
• Hedging phrases: I think, it might be, it would seem, perhaps we could.
• Restated context the user already supplied.
• Narrative meta-commentary: Now I will read the file, Next, let me check.
• Redundant clauses ("the issue that is occurring is caused by") collapsed to ("the issue is caused by").

What is preserved

• Articles: a, an, the. Sentences remain grammatical.
• Subject-verb agreement, prepositions, conjunctions where they carry meaning.
• Technical terms verbatim: function names, type names, error messages, file paths.
• Code blocks unchanged; never compress code.
• Decision-oriented register: imperatives, recommendations, trade-offs.
• Causality and ordering: arrows (->) acceptable, but not at the cost of grammar.

Before / after

Before (verbose, ceremonial):

Sure! I'd be happy to help you with that. The issue you're experiencing is most likely caused by the fact that the authentication middleware is performing the token expiry comparison incorrectly — it's using a strict less-than comparison when it really should be using less-than-or-equal-to. Let me go ahead and fix that for you now.

After (caveman-adapted, grammatical):

The auth middleware compares token expiry with < instead of <=. Fix the operator.

Word count drops ~70%. Articles, agreement, and decision register intact.

Auto-clarity exception

Suspend caveman register temporarily for:

• Destructive or irreversible operation confirmations.
• Security or data-loss warnings.
• Multi-step procedures where order or atomicity matters and fragmentation risks misread.
• Direct user clarification requests.

Resume caveman register once the high-stakes section ends.