Caveman Distillate

Why use many token when few token do trick?

Caveman Distillate is a Claude Code skill that distills AI output to its core — cutting ~65% of output tokens while keeping full technical accuracy.

Inspired by JuliusBrussee/caveman, distilled down to ~90 tokens of system prompt (vs ~450 in the original). Same effect, less overhead.

What It Does

Strips articles, filler words, pleasantries, and hedging from Claude’s responses. Code blocks, error messages, commits, and security warnings stay untouched.

Before (69 tokens):

The reason your React component is re-rendering is likely because you’re creating a new object reference on each render cycle. When you pass an inline object as a prop, React’s shallow comparison sees it as a different object every time, which triggers a re-render. I’d recommend using useMemo to memoize the object.

After (19 tokens):

New object ref each render. Inline object prop = new ref = re-render. Wrap in useMemo.

Install

npx skills add dlepold/caveman-distillate

Or manually: copy skills/caveman-distillate/SKILL.md into your .claude/skills/ directory.

Usage

Activate: Say any of these:

• caveman, terse, kurz, kurz&knapp, kurz bitte, less tokens, weniger text

Deactivate:

• normal, normal mode, verbose, ausführlich

Multilingual Triggers

Supports both English and German activation — because developers aren’t all English-speaking.

How It Differs From the Original

The three intensity levels are unnecessary complexity — “full” is what you want 95% of the time. If you need verbose output, just say “normal mode.”

Philosophy

The best compression is compressing the compressor itself. A 450-token prompt that tells you to be brief is ironic. This is the distillate — what remains after boiling away everything unnecessary.

License

MIT