Skip to content

Adopting caveman at lite, without its init block

This is a decision

What I chose, given my values, wishes and principles, and the reasoning that got me there.

caveman is a skill that tells an agent to answer in fewer words. Its free layer is one SKILL.md, and its installer also writes an always-on rule body into AGENTS.md. I took the first and not the second.

What I wanted

Replies that have lost their filler, and kept their grammar.

The part of an agent's reply I actually want gone is the narration around tool calls and the opening acknowledgement. Dropped articles are a different thing, arrived at for a different reason: they are there to spend fewer tokens, and I am not paying attention to that.

What I care about

Write in a calm, quantified, settled-fact voice and Hand the reader one idea at a time. Both of those want full sentences, and a register that drops articles cannot deliver either.

Route a rule to the layer that reaches whoever must obey it, which decides where each half of the skill goes once the two halves turn out to want different homes.

What that led me to

The skill and the always-on block reach different audiences, so they are not one thing to install. A skill is pulled in when a session asks for terseness. A rule body in AGENTS.md is loaded into every session whether or not it is wanted, and mine already carries a writing section that argues for the opposite register. --with-init would have appended a second style block beside the first, and the two disagree.

The upstream default is stronger than its own description promises. lite is described as keeping full sentences, whilst article-dropping sits in the baseline rules and therefore applies at every level including that one. Lowering the default is not enough on its own; the rule has to move.

What I built

A hand-copied SKILL.md, changed in three places, and three sentences written into AGENTS.md by hand rather than by the installer.

Half Where What changed
The skill my own skills directory default level lite rather than full; article-dropping moved out of the baseline into full and above; the classical Chinese levels dropped
The always-on part the writing section of my harness AGENTS.md three rules: fire tools without narrating them, skip the opening acknowledgement, do not recap what was just said

Installing by hand is a copy of one file, because a skill is discovered by its SKILL.md rather than declared.

The following pages link to this page: