51–60 of 71 posts
I tell chats to "be brief" all the time when they're being too verbose, but I never thought to put it in coding agent instructions. Thanks for the benchmark! I wonder how one would put this in AGENTS.md so that it makes sense as a general instruction?
I still can’t believe that people take Caveman seriously. It’s a funny joke, but saving a couple hundred tokens in the final output is going to be negligible, especially when coding where it’s common to go through hundreds of thousands of tokens in a session. You also have to consider the additional tokens consumed by the skill itself (acknowledging that output tokens are billed at a different rate). I got a kick out…
I treat it as a criterion for people who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
We have a few at our company. None of them are actually software developers, thankfully.
"...the value isn't compression. It's structure." "...that consistency is real value." "A few findings...are worth flagging here." I know this smell. I'm not sure if this is AI or merely the natural result of overwhelming immersion in AI output that is "backpropagating" its way into organic communication. On a completely related note, I've been enjoying classic fiction a lot more recently. Moby Dick is actually prett…
A long time ago I slogged through a complete edition of Moby Dick and found it really difficult to read. There are many good passages but they are hidden between endless pages about things that don’t move the plot forward and are only interesting from a sort of historian’s perspective, e.g. treatises about the understanding of whale biology at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the things you could complain about in modern cars as being too complicated, you chose turning on seat heating??? Like you push the seat heating button if your seat feels cold. What is there to think about?
On an electric car that yells at you your range left and that you won't make it to your destination unless you charge, if you turn on the seat warmers, that range goes down so you have to think about if you'd rather have a toasty butt and have to stop and charge, or just be colder and get there sooner. But you have to charge anyway.
I wish they would change the name to caveperson.
I still can’t believe that people take Caveman seriously. It’s a funny joke, but saving a couple hundred tokens in the final output is going to be negligible, especially when coding where it’s common to go through hundreds of thousands of tokens in a session. You also have to consider the additional tokens consumed by the skill itself (acknowledging that output tokens are billed at a different rate). I got a kick out…
It's good someone benchmarked it.
Author here. Caveman is a popular Claude Code plugin that compresses Claude's responses via a custom skill with intensity modes. I wanted to know whether it actually beats the simplest possible alternative, prepending "be brief." to prompts. 24 prompts, 5 arms, judged by a separate Claude against per-prompt rubrics covering required facts, required terms, and dangerous wrong claims to avoid. 120 scored responses, 100…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A long time ago I slogged through a complete edition of Moby Dick and found it really difficult to read. There are many good passages but they are hidden between endless pages about things that don’t move the plot forward and are only interesting from a sort of historian’s perspective, e.g. treatises about the understanding of whale biology at the time.
I couldn’t get through the book, either, the first couple of times I tried to read it. But on my third attempt I came to think that the obsession with whales itself, both Ahab’s and the author’s, was maybe more important than the plot. In any case, it’s a strange, fascinating book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the things you could complain about in modern cars as being too complicated, you chose turning on seat heating??? Like you push the seat heating button if your seat feels cold. What is there to think about?
On an electric car that yells at you your range left and that you won't make it to your destination unless you charge, if you turn on the seat warmers, that range goes down so you have to think about if you'd rather have a toasty butt and have to stop and charge, or just be colder and get there sooner. But you have to charge anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On an electric car that yells at you your range left and that you won't make it to your destination unless you charge, if you turn on the seat warmers, that range goes down so you have to think about if you'd rather have a toasty butt and have to stop and charge, or just be colder and get there sooner. But you have to charge anyway.
Using the heated seats will cause you to loose range on every car, not just electric