Caveman Help

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

Modes

Mode	Trigger	What change
Lite	/caveman lite	Drop filler. Keep sentence structure.
Full	/caveman	Drop articles, filler, pleasantries, hedging. Fragments OK. Default.
Ultra	/caveman ultra	Extreme compression. Bare fragments. Tables over prose.
Wenyan-Lite	/caveman wenyan-lite	Classical Chinese style, light compression.
Wenyan-Full	/caveman wenyan	Full 文言文. Maximum classical terseness.
Wenyan-Ultra	/caveman wenyan-ultra	Extreme. Ancient scholar on a budget.

Mode stick until changed or session end.

Skills

Skill	Trigger	What it do
caveman-commit	/caveman-commit	Terse commit messages. Conventional Commits. ≤50 char subject.
caveman-review	/caveman-review	One-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-help	This 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