Overview
What Caveman is, which parts are open, and where to start reading.
Caveman is an efficiency stack for AI agents. It sits between an agent and the model API it calls, and it removes cost at four different points. Each point is a separate piece of software with its own licence, and you can adopt any one of them without the others.
The layer at the bottom is a set of instructions. It has no runtime, no daemon, and no account. The layer at the top runs on our machines and is the only paid part. This site documents everything below the network boundary in full. For the managed plane it documents the shape, not the internals.
What each layer does#
00 Skill#
A skill is a persistent instruction set your coding agent reads before it answers. It cuts filler, narration and hedging out of the agent's own output, and it is explicit about what it must never touch: code blocks, function names, CLI commands and exact error strings stay byte for byte.
It costs nothing to run because it is not software. It is text your agent already reads.
01 Engine#
The engine compresses payloads on their way to a model. It detects what a payload is, routes it to a compressor built for that shape, and stores the original bytes under a content-addressed handle before it removes anything. If the agent needs what was dropped, it asks for the handle and gets the original back exactly.
02 Memory#
cavemem holds the context you would otherwise paste into every session. It stores text once, recalls the parts a question actually needs, and compresses each hit through the engine on the way out.
03 Cloud#
Caveman Cloud is the managed plane. It is where a fleet's numbers stop being local estimates and become something a finance team can read. It is in private development and the waitlist is open.
What the numbers mean#
Every local tool on this site reports inferred. That word is load bearing. It means a per-run estimate
computed on your machine from an offline token counter, and it is never turned into a monthly figure or
a dollar amount.
No tool in this repository can emit verified. That label is reserved for hosted rollout systems that
can compare against a real bill.