I benchmarked Claude Code's caveman plugin against "be brief."

How about caveman+be brief?

or better yet actually use "grug" which comes with architectural sense

Is caveman speech brief, or is it just more consistent with the Chinese language? The Chinese language famously lack ALL inflections, conjugations, anything that modify spelling of words.

Thanks for the research!

Though I feel like industry veterans (especially those working with LLMs) came to this conclusion without having to write a single prompt. Even ignoring the technical merits of these kinds of hacks, if you think you've outwitted billions of dollars of statistics with a prompt, you're probably wrong at this point.

What I find most interesting is the popularity of these snake oils, especially the ones that are easy to install and never check. The tech moves so fast and the research is so scarce and poor-quality that the bullshit asymmetry principle wins and people buy into these cargo cults.

Maybe we need a plugin to check if a new plugin/prompting technique/LLM lifehack is BS.

>The model still does its full reasoning before generating the response, caveman just affects how the final response is formatted

Right, and that final response forms the latest context for your next follow-up prompt. Not having that final reasoning laid out in the conversation history leaves a huge gap in successive reasoning. I remember playing around with this idea in the Sonnet 3.x days and it was immediately obvious how the ability to handle long running tasks degraded. If you are just doing single-shot work for some reason, sure, but that's not what most real world usage looks like these days.