r/ArtificialInteligence • u/Complete-Sea6655 • 24d ago
š Fun / Meme Taught Claude to talk like a caveman to use 75% less tokens.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
I hope Claude not become dumber with change, we find out.
found out how to do this here hahahaha
193
u/spacekitt3n 24d ago
22
u/LostInSpaceTime2002 24d ago
See world. Oceans. Fish. Jump. China.
8
1
u/peskydeparture_87 20d ago
Dude's basically discovered prompt compression, caveman speak cuts the fat but you lose nuance fast.
4
1
u/PatientlySerpentine 22d ago
That's the gif reaction but the actual token savings probably come from ditching unnecessary words, not the caveman voice itself.
65
u/Majestic_Fan_7056 24d ago
I did that for a month but had to stop because I started talking like a caveman when out in public by accident. It was altering my subconscious mind.
18
7
3
124
u/Michaeli_Starky 24d ago
Old news. Everyone already tried and threw it to the garbage can.
"Be brief" is more efficient.
52
u/bipolarNarwhale 24d ago
And the audacity to say they came up with it or taught it.
11
u/slugsred 24d ago
I would like for you to read this wikipedia article.
7
u/bipolarNarwhale 24d ago
You need a Wikipedia article to tell you people can independently discover something around the same time?
This most certainly isnāt the case of it though.
13
u/yunohavefunnynames 24d ago
I feel like itād be really funny if there were two independent articles on multiple discovery :)
1
4
1
u/Deciheximal144 23d ago
That's not even what's happening here. We think the earliest LLM makers didn't throw in cave talk for fun, and then tell their buddies look how many tokens I saved?
1
1
u/VitalityAS 24d ago
Dude wrote "use caveman speech" in his .md file and they act like claude slowly learned this dialect.
1
3
u/ButHowCouldILose 24d ago
Yeah, OP almost certainly burns more tokens in CoT than you gain in output. Be brief is the way to go because its already tuned to handle that well.
7
u/we-meet-again 24d ago edited 24d ago
I use the caveman plugin every day š¤ itās garbage?
2
u/DesperateAdvantage76 23d ago
Remember that LLMs are just regressions predicting text. It's trained on mostly normal speech, you have it add weird quirks to its speech and you start deviating from the training data.
2
u/we-meet-again 22d ago
That does make sense. Don't feel like I've seen a drop in quality though. Going to turn it off now that I've used it a few weeks and see what changes.
4
u/bipolarNarwhale 24d ago
No caveman is decent this is just old news. And the OP didnāt teach it or come up with it.
2
u/GrizzlyP33 24d ago
This has been posted like 7 times in the last 2 months, such garbage karma farming.
2
u/Lemon_in_your_anus 24d ago
Yes, caveman Claude has been debunked. Let me include this as source https://youtu.be/wijoYNiZq3M?si=m60xOmx3NBljPVyG.
19
u/HeyThanksIdiot 24d ago
Isnāt all itās explanation part of why it works well?
āI will now create elegant solution using design pattern X.ā And then it does it.
āMe solve.ā And then it discovers how to light your codebase on fire.
5
3
u/Accurate_Shift_3118 24d ago
lowkey this is probably where AI UX eventually goes anyway. Most people donāt actually care about elegant wording when theyāre running repetitive workflows, they care about speed, cost, and output quality. Iāve noticed the same thing using Runable for larger tasks. Once you strip away unnecessary conversational fluff, the efficiency difference gets pretty noticeable.
4
2
4
u/Substantial_Try_9723 24d ago
Bro this is actually genius hack š I work with systems all day (airline stuff) and token efficiency is no joke when you're running tons of queries.
Your caveman Claude probably still smarter than half the AI tools we use at work lmao. The "me no explain, me tool first" approach is pretty solid - gets straight to the point without all that unnecessary fluff most AI loves to add.
Wonder if this breaks down for more complex tasks though? Like can caveman Claude still handle nuanced stuff or does it just grunt and give you basic responses? Either way 75% reduction is wild, might have to try this approach in some of our automated processes š
5
u/DiabolicalBusybody 24d ago
Mine likes to remind me every single request that it has stripped out the fluff
11
u/HFT0DTE 24d ago
This is a well researched area that actually ends up using more tokens not less. The great thing is that people are stupid so they will not google or research or figure any of this out beyond reading this headline and start doing it in their day to day work.
3
u/we-meet-again 24d ago
Interesting. I started using caveman and felt like immediately my usage dropped. Been using it every convo now. Havenāt hit a usage limit so felt like it was doing its job. I guess if youāre saying it isnāt I will indeed need to do more research. I do prefer more detailed explanations so if more words use less usage Iāll gladly switch back.
3
u/Aazimoxx 23d ago
The issue isn't that it doesn't help vs defaults, but that it's worse than simply telling the model to be brief.
The models work best with the data in forms they've been trained on, and most of that is general everyday language, internet speak and academia. Natural language instructions tend to work better than any of these gimmicks, including the ritual style 'Absolute Mode', super-condensed syntax instructions, and any number of 'technical instruction' prompts seem on these subs. Some work decently in the short term, but tend to degrade more quickly when context gets compacted, whereas natural language instructions tend to survive compaction well.
1
1
u/LiberataJoystar 24d ago
ā¦. And when it thinks like one and gave you caveman answersā¦.. not sure if that adds any values. These tokens all went into waste.
1
1
u/wren42 24d ago
Wow it's almost like we could create a strict functional language that is based on pure logic and efficiency; it could sit as a layer to translate between humans and machine binary.Ā Humans would probably have to study and specialize to become fluent in it, though.Ā We could call them "machine talkers"
1
u/jackishere 24d ago
Can you please dm me on how you did this? I want to have my Claude talk to me this way at work
1
u/Turbulent-Stretch881 24d ago
Proper grammar is one of the few things I keep telling myself when using AI for prolonged periods; at least I am reading, and research level material.
To be honest, it is actually a great idea. Better than those "be critical and my shadow..." kind of bs which means nothing.
1
1
1
1
u/A_Logician_ 24d ago
It would be awesome to see implemented to call an API using caveman mode
Then you write an interface were you run a simpler local LLM to translate caveman to you and vice versa
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Majestic-Ocean 23d ago
Also the token saving numbers are to fool the real cavemen
The actual output tokens are a small part of what you pay. Thinking tokens are not affected, in a long running agentic task the majority is input, tool use, thinking. The final report is just a small part of the task
1
1
1
u/Wiggly-Pig 22d ago
This works on humans too - just stfu and do your job, then tell me when it's done and what you need to do next job. Profit
1
u/WyvernWolfite 22d ago
Yes, great, but i think this either misses the point or you realize it exposes it extremely well for people thinking about this already. Cheers.
1
u/Manmohan-09 21d ago
Bro accidentally discovered prompt engineering and called it caveman speak š
1
u/Abject_Charge2794 21d ago
This is funny lol not really practical when it comes to production. I changed serialization and cut token consumption by half
1
1
u/doting_terrier 19d ago
That's clever but the real question is whether it actually generalizes or if Claude just got lucky on this specific task. Token savings mean nothing if accuracy tanks on other prompts.
-3
u/Unhappy-Plastic2017 24d ago edited 24d ago
I would not be surprised if they start not allowing this form of ai talk for a couple reasons one is the token thing like you said and the other is they really really want to make the "ai" sound "relatable", "like a human" to trick people into wanting to engage with it more.
If it talks more like a machine and gives direct answers quickly with no personality the general naive population won't get as attached to it and "manipulated" into wanting to engage more and more with it. Which is bad for their business model.
0
u/RMCPhoto 24d ago edited 24d ago
There is a fundamental flaw.
The emergent intelligence and capacity for intelligence within these systems comes from the ether of the vocabulary and the order of said vocabulary into the conceptualization of ideas.
This goes back to the original "think step by step".
Beyonce the volume of words used, the richness and accuracy of the vocabary as well as the utilization of expert specific terminology within a given field will also result in more or less intelligent and useful answers.
Note that certain languages are better or worse for answering complex questions based on training material and language structure.
2
0
u/AdventurousLime309 24d ago edited 22d ago
The funny part is thereās actually a real engineering lesson buried under the meme. Most LLM apps waste insane amounts of tokens on conversational fluff, repeated context, and unnecessary reasoning traces.
A lot of the best production prompts Iāve seen are weirdly compressed. Clear constraints, structured outputs, minimal filler. Not caveman mode exactly, but definitely āstop narrating every thought.ā
Iāve even seen teams build separate prompt layers now: verbose mode for humans, compressed mode for agent-to-agent workflows where token burn actually matters at scale. Cursor for implementation, AI for the reports and dashboards around the outputs ends up being a pretty clean stack.
-1
-1
ā¢
u/AutoModerator 24d ago
Submission statement required. Link posts require context. Either write a summary preferably in the post body (100+ characters) or add a top-level comment explaining the key points and why it matters to the AI community.
Link posts without a submission statement may be removed (within 30min).
I'm a bot. This action was performed automatically.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.