Caveman Compress

by JuliusBrussee

Caveman Compress is an Automation skill for Claude Code, published by JuliusBrussee in caveman.

97.8K stars5.6K forkson JuliusBrussee/cavemanAdded 2026/08/13Repository updated 2026/08/13

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aianthropiccavemanclaudeclaude-codellmmemeprompt-engineeringskilltokens

Install in seconds

Install Caveman Compress

Copy Caveman Compress into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman/tree/main/skills/caveman-compress ~/.claude/skills/caveman-compress

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/caveman-compress/SKILL.md in JuliusBrussee/caveman
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/caveman-compress
Collection: One of 20 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Automation — 1523 skills

What Caveman Compress does

Caveman Compress compresses natural language memory files (CLAUDE.md, todos, preferences) into caveman-speak to save input tokens, preserving code, URLs, paths, and structure. It backs up the original and overwrites the file.

Caveman Compress is cataloged under Automation on DirSkills. Caveman Compress comes from a repository tagged ai, anthropic, caveman, claude and claude-code.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Caveman Compress

Purpose

Compress natural language files (CLAUDE.md, todos, preferences) into caveman-speak to reduce input tokens. Compressed version overwrites original. Human-readable backup saved as <filename>.original.md, but NOT beside the source file — it lives in an out-of-tree data dir ($XDG_DATA_HOME/caveman-compress/backups/<parent-dir-name>/, or %LOCALAPPDATA%\caveman-compress\backups\<parent-dir-name>\ on Windows) so skill auto-loaders don't re-ingest it as a live file.

Trigger

/caveman-compress <filepath> or when user asks to compress a memory file.

Process

The compression scripts live in scripts/ (adjacent to this SKILL.md). If the path is not immediately available, search for scripts/__main__.py next to this SKILL.md.

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Commands Caveman Compress provides

Slash commands named in this skill’s SKILL.md, listed in the order they first appear.

/caveman-compress

Frequently asked about Caveman Compress

What else does JuliusBrussee publish alongside Caveman Compress?
Caveman Compress is one of 20 skills that DirSkills catalogs from JuliusBrussee/caveman, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Cavecrew, Caveman and Caveman Commit. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Caveman Compress does, and is maintained by JuliusBrussee in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the JuliusBrussee/caveman page.
How does Caveman Compress compare to other Automation skills?
Caveman Compress ranks #11 by stars among the 1523 Automation skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Autonomous Loops, Autonomous Agent Harness and Automation Audit Ops. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Caveman Compress against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.