JuliusBrussee/caveman

Caveman is a plugin for AI coding assistants that forces the AI to respond in stripped-down, caveman-style language — cutting out filler words and verbose explanations while keeping all code and technical output perfectly intact. It works across popular AI coding tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and claims to reduce the AI's word count by up to 65% on conversational responses.

97.6k5.6k34 contributorsGosource ↗

§ 1 — what it does

Caveman is a plugin for AI coding assistants that forces the AI to respond in stripped-down, caveman-style language — cutting out filler words and verbose explanations while keeping all code and technical output perfectly intact. It works across popular AI coding tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and claims to reduce the AI's word count by up to 65% on conversational responses.

§ 2 — why it matters

AI coding tools charge by the token (the units of text they process and generate), so reducing unnecessary output directly lowers costs at scale — this is real money for teams running AI assistants continuously across large codebases. It also signals a growing market for 'efficiency layers' on top of AI tools, where the winning strategy isn't just better answers but leaner, cheaper delivery of those answers.

§ 3 — why it’s trending

The idea that you can slash AI assistant costs and noise by simply changing how it talks — not what it knows — struck a nerve, and 88,000 stars later it's clear builders are hungry for practical ways to reduce token spend without sacrificing accuracy. Weekly stars dipped from 6,800 to 4,600, so the initial viral spike is cooling, but 58 commits in the last month and 360 new forks signal that real users are actively building with it rather than just bookmarking it. The Hacker News chatter this month kept it in front of the kind of cost-conscious engineers who are now watching their Claude and Cursor bills closely, which is exactly the audience that turns a clever trick into a lasting tool.

§ 4 — related entries

4 entries

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get-bb/bb

63/100

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