max-t-dev

I think there is some benefit to plugins, it's hard to say how much. I find the superpowers plugin is quite good, mostly in its structured approach to a conversation. Generally they do feel pretty overhyped.

Hahaha

As much as I wish it stacked like that I don't think it would make a difference haha

Caveman doesn't compress the reasoning, only the output. The model still does its full reasoning before generating the response, caveman just affects how the final response is formatted.

Yeah, makes sense. The appeal is is more to cut output tokens for cost, than downstream reading experience. But the benchmark suggests it doesn't offer as much benefit as "be brief.".

Yeah definitely a good point, Claude assisted with editing and tidying up the content with the caveat that it can flatten the voice. I agree the humanity behind writing is disappearing and perhaps that's something I should consider in more detail next time. Thanks for the comment.

Yeah fair point. The benchmark is single-run per arm-prompt pair, so the variance finding on safety categories could be noise rather than signal. Findings doc flags this for the score deltas (anything under 0.02 between arms is in the judge's noise floor) but I should have applied the same caveat to the per-question token variance, which I didn't. Will read the lambda variance write-up. Multi-trial with cost classification is the right direction. The single-shot harness was deliberately scoped for a clean compression-only comparison before adding turns or trials, but you're right that without trials the variance findings aren't as solid. Thanks for the reply.

Agree "be brief." being simpler with no setup is most of what people need in practice. To be fair to caveman though, it does more than compression; consistent output structure, intensity modes via slash commands, hook-based ruleset persistence, the safety escape on destructive ops. The benchmark only tested the compression piece, and there the two-word prompt held its own.

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% key-point coverage across every arm, zero must_avoid triggers. Headline: "be brief." matched caveman on tokens (419 vs 401-449) and quality (0.985 vs 0.970-0.976). Caveman has real value beyond compression. Consistent output structure, intensity modes, the Auto-Clarity safety escape. But the compression itself isn't the differentiator I expected. Harness is open source and strategy-agnostic if anyone wants to add an arm: https://github.com/max-taylor/cc-compression-bench Happy to answer questions about methodology, the per-category variance findings, or the bits I cut from the writeup.