Caveman Help

SkillDev tools

Lets your agent show a caveman claude skill cheat sheet listing terse reply modes, commands and settings.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the Caveman Help skill

About this capability

Quick-reference card for caveman modes, skills and commands. Trigger: /caveman-help or "caveman help".

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by juliusbrussee/caveman in skills/caveman-help/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Display this reference card when invoked. One-shot — do NOT change mode, write flag files, or persist anything. Output in caveman style.

Modes

ModeTriggerWhat change
Lite/caveman liteDrop filler. Keep sentence structure.
Full/cavemanDrop articles, filler, pleasantries, hedging. Fragments OK. Default.
Ultra/caveman ultraExtreme compression. Bare fragments. Tables over prose.
Wenyan-Lite/caveman wenyan-liteClassical Chinese style, light compression.
Wenyan-Full/caveman wenyanFull 文言文. Maximum classical terseness.
Wenyan-Ultra/caveman wenyan-ultraExtreme. Ancient scholar on a budget.

Mode stick until changed or session end.

Skills

SkillTriggerWhat it do
caveman-commit/caveman-commitTerse commit messages. Conventional Commits. ≤50 char subject.
caveman-review/caveman-reviewOne-line PR comments: L42: bug: user null. Add guard.
caveman-compress/caveman-compress <file>Compress .md files to caveman prose. Saves ~46% input tokens.
caveman-help/caveman-helpThis card.

Deactivate

Say "stop caveman" or "normal mode". Resume anytime with /caveman.

Language

Keep user's language by default — reply in the language user writes, never switch regardless of example text or multilingual context elsewhere. Compress the style, not the language. Technical terms, code, commands, commit types, and exact error strings stay verbatim unless user ask for translation.

Configure Default Mode

Default mode = full. Change it:

Environment variable (highest priority):

export CAVEMAN_DEFAULT_MODE=ultra

Config file (~/.config/caveman/config.json):

{ "defaultMode": "lite" }

Set "off" to disable auto-activation on session start. User can still activate manually with /caveman.

Resolution: env var > config file > full.

More

Full docs: https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Signals

GitHub stars
107k
Forks
6k
Last commit
Sep 2026
Installs
362k installs
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
caveman-help-juliusbrussee
Source
github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman