Does Caveman Mode Actually Work?
Caveman is a Claude plugin that asks the model to answer in terse fragments. Does it save money? Sometimes—mostly when the model would otherwise produce a very long answer. I compared Caveman’s lite, full, ultra, and wenyan modes with two baselines: no added instruction and “Answer concisely.” The benchmark covered 15 prompts, three runs per condition, and two Claude Opus models. I measured token cost, not answer quality. Model and task Caveman cost vs. concise Claude Opus 4.7, short Lite +10%; Full +3%; Ultra +3%; Wenyan +10% Claude Opus 4.7, long Lite +9%; Full +10%; Ultra −5%; Wenyan −1% Claude Opus 4.6, short All modes: 3–16% less; uncertain Claude Opus 4.6, long Lite −54%; Full −56%; Ultra −59%; Wenyan −58% Positive numbers mean higher cost; negative numbers mean savings. The practical rule: Caveman has to save enough output tokens to pay for its added instructions. That is easy with a long tutorial and hard with a short answer. ...