docs.caveman.so
Documentation for the parts of Caveman you run yourself.
Caveman is an efficiency stack for AI agents. Four layers sit between your agent and the bill it generates. Three of them run on your machine and are open. This site documents those, and says plainly what each one can and cannot prove.
in one picture
What happens to a request
The skill shapes what the agent writes. The engine reduces what leaves. The dashed path is the part that makes the rest safe: anything the engine removed can be fetched back exactly.
get going
First three pages
by layer
Everything, in stack order
Each layer is independent. Nothing above one is required by the one below it.
- OverviewA set of instructions that changes how your agent spends tokens. No runtime, no proxy.
- caveman learnProfile a local agent session and rank what is actually eating the budget.
- caveman exploreRead a repository without dragging every file into context.
- Agent profilesThe registry of coding agents the skill knows how to configure.
- OverviewContent-aware compression that keeps the parts an answer depends on.
- CompressorsOne router per content shape: JSON, logs, code, diffs, search results, prose.
- Recoverable compressionWhy lossy stays honest: every removed byte can be fetched back.
- Token countingThe offline counter behind every ratio the engine reports.
- caveman-shrinkShrink command output before it reaches the model.
the part worth reading twice
What the numbers are allowed to say
Every local tool reports inferred, meaning a per-run estimate computed on your machine. Nothing here can emit verified, and no setting changes that.
Local figures stay labelled inferred and are never multiplied into a monthly number.
On any error, unsupported input, or result that is not smaller, the original bytes are kept.
Every unknown case resolves toward doing less. Unknown mode means pass-through.
Nothing lossy is emitted until the original is stored and can be fetched back exactly.
for agents
This site is readable without a browser
Every page is also plain text. You do not need to parse the HTML, and there is no separate copy to go stale: the Markdown is generated from the same source the page renders from.
- /llms.txt
- Every page with a one-line summary, grouped by layer.
- /llms-full.txt
- The full text of the whole site in one file.
- /docs/engine.md
- Any page as plain Markdown. Append .md to the path.
- /sitemap.xml
- Machine-readable index of everything that exists.
the fine print, up front
Licensing and telemetry
Which surfaces are MIT, which are BSL 1.1, and what that means for you.
What the CLI sends, what it never sends, and the three ways to turn it off.
The grader set used to check that compression did not change an answer.
The model price table every cost figure is read from.
The public repository. Everything documented here is in it.