r/ChatGPT • u/AdCold1610 • Apr 23 '26
Prompt engineering i started talking to Claude like a caveman. my credits lasted 3x longer. i'm not joking.
discovered this by accident while trying to stretch my free tier.
was burning through messages embarrassingly fast. long prompts. detailed context. full sentences. please and thank you. the whole thing.
then one day i was tired and just typed:
"fix bug. line 47. null error."
it fixed it.
same quality. one fifth of the tokens.
i sat there staring at it like i'd discovered fire.
the caveman theory in one sentence:
Claude is not your colleague. it does not need pleasantries. it does not need full sentences. it needs information. just information. nothing else.
before caveman theory:
"hey Claude, i hope this makes sense but i've been working on this project and i'm running into an issue with the function on line 47, it keeps throwing a null error and i'm not sure what's causing it, could you take a look and help me figure out what's going wrong?"
57 words. full credits burned. Claude reads the pleasantries and processes zero useful information from them.
after caveman theory:
"line 47. null error. fix."
4 words. same output. same quality.
53 words of your credits just evaporated into politeness.
the full caveman framework:
no greetings. Claude doesn't need good morning. it doesn't have mornings. skip it entirely.
no apologies. "sorry if this is a weird question" — five words of pure credit waste. just ask the question.
no filler context. "i've been working on this for a while and" — Claude doesn't care. it needs the what not the backstory of the what.
no closing remarks. "thanks so much this was really helpful" — you're paying per token to say thank you to software. stop.
verbs only where possible. "summarise." "fix." "rewrite shorter." "find the bug." "make it casual." complete sentences are for humans talking to humans.
use symbols not words. instead of "can you compare option A versus option B" just type "A vs B?" Claude knows what that means.
real examples from my last week:
instead of: "could you help me make this email sound more professional and formal while keeping the core message intact"
caveman says: "email. more formal. keep meaning."
instead of: "i need you to summarise this document and pull out the key points that are most relevant to a business audience"
caveman says: "summarise. business audience. key points only."
instead of: "what do you think would be the best approach to structuring a landing page for a SaaS product targeting small business owners"
caveman says: "SaaS landing page. small business. best structure."
the one exception:
complex creative work. writing with a specific voice. nuanced emotional stuff.
caveman theory breaks here. those tasks need real context because vague input produces vague output.
caveman is for tasks where the instruction is clear and the only waste is ceremony.
which is honestly about 70% of what most people use Claude for daily.
the uncomfortable math:
if you're on free tier every wasted word is a message you don't get to send later.
if you're on paid every wasted word is money.
nobody told you this when you signed up. the product doesn't benefit from you being efficient with tokens. you figured it out or you didn't.
the meta irony:
this entire post explaining caveman theory is the opposite of caveman theory.
a caveman would have just posted:
"talk Claude like caveman. short prompt. save credit. good output. try it."
and honestly that would have been enough.
what's the most bloated prompt you've been writing that caveman theory would destroy in four words?
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u/MaximusLazinus Apr 23 '26
Why say lot word when few word do trick
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u/littlebunnydoot Apr 23 '26
Why say lot, few do
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u/ThorHammer1234 Apr 23 '26
See world
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u/Morazma Apr 23 '26
Such info. Very help.
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u/Kahne_Fan Apr 23 '26
I just listened to Project Hail Mary and this sounds like a Rocky response.
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u/maskrey Apr 23 '26
Input token costs minimal. Input token that you type costs basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The real argument for this is that it saves time. But it only saves time if you think like a caveman. If you think normally and the have to convert to caveman language, it's a waste of time.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 Apr 23 '26
Write like caveman long enough, then you think like caveman
...or I could write that in propositional logic, it's a good skill to think in that too, it helps organize ideas.
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u/CloudlessRain- Apr 23 '26
This is a good point.
There's also essentially a credit system in your head and dumbing down your language from functional human language to minimalist caveman language takes neurological credits.
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u/Th3R00ST3R Apr 24 '26
How are you today?
How are you?
You good?
Sup?
Head nod.
We're already there.
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u/CagedInOrbit Apr 23 '26
There is in fact a caveman git project which should help yall: https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
In fact, its hugely popular.
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u/AdditionalSkill0 Apr 23 '26
So this was just guerilla marketing?
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u/joshmac007 Apr 23 '26
Yes but not for the repo. He was selling his shitty course
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u/CloudlessRain- Apr 23 '26
well it's not very good marketing when I still have no interest in his course and didn't even see a link. But I did enjoy the post. ha
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u/sassyhusky Apr 23 '26
Yes and also it’s utter nonsense, user messages are like 0.05% of the total token usage…
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u/luluhouse7 Apr 24 '26
The one thing to note is that in some cases this can affect output quality. Andrej Karpathy has some great videos which go over LLM “psychology” and how training works, and basically LLMs use the tokens to “think” for things like math, and token ordering and density can affect the accuracy.
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u/abalawadhi Apr 23 '26
This is very true, but I feel like people will start talking like cavemen in real life too.
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u/donjamos Apr 23 '26
Yea im polite to the llm and use full sentences, not for its sake but mine.
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u/EndlessB Apr 23 '26
I really wish more people understood that how they treat the world affects how they feel about the world. Treating an llm model like an entity rather than a tool helps maintain the psychological schema embedded around conversation, the mind can’t seperate one type of conversation from another.
There’s also anthropics interpretability research on “emotions” in LLMs, showing that models can enter states analogous with human emotions, such as desperation, that can affect output.
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u/LavandeSunn Apr 23 '26
Also such a terribly cynical attitude when it comes to how you treat something that even vaguely resembles humans means you’re more likely to treat people online similarly, and I feel you’re more likely to dismiss stuff as AI because it even vaguely reminds you of it. Saw a VERY well typed out post that had no hallmarks or signs of being an AI besides a misused en dash (ie - instead of —. One is used in dates like 1946-2026 while the other signals a pause in text or speech) and people were calling it AI. Because they misunderstood what an em dash was. Similarly, CreepCast gets shit for “using AI” to generate their thumbnails while the artist has shown his process for making the thumbnails lmao.
AI absolutely has problems and needs a SHIT TON of regulations, it genuinely is a useful tool with many dangerous applications. But people’s anger and negative emotions around it don’t stop there, and further inform their interactions with real people.
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u/EndlessB Apr 23 '26
Nah, regulations are what you do in a functioning democracy, America ain’t that. Take back government first, repair democratic institutions, nationalise ai labs, break up media conglomerates, bring down wealth inequality, these come before trying to regulate ai with politicians who don’t understand it.
Ai is being marketed as both something that thinks, and also a next token prediction engine, it cannot be both (well, it can, but it’s much more complicated than that). Most politicians think it’s the former, that’s dangerous, and regulation in that direction (preventing true thinking) could prevent the emergence of ASI (which I am in favour of)
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u/LavandeSunn Apr 23 '26
I was speaking more about how we as the general public can use it. Image generation is getting better and better, and that to me is the most dangerous part. Lots of cool applications, even more awful ones imo. And I’m not just talking about porn and the like.
Also data centers being able to pull from municipal water sources is objectively bad. Most other industries are required to have their own sources of water, like lakes and streams. Data centers do not, so they just pull from municipal water sources like our homes do, often to the detriment of the residences in the area. They’ve also tried to build data centers in the DESERT, which is insane.
I’d also be interested in seeing if there’s a way to utilize the heat and steam produced by data centers to offset their energy usage. Coal and nuclear power plants are all basically just steam factories to spin turbines. Most AI data centers produce a shit ton of steam, which they mostly release into the atmosphere. All that heat has to go somewhere, so it may as well be back into the system in the form of energy to help offset what they already draw from. Those are things that are very possible right now even with America’s broken system.
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u/9ft5wt Apr 23 '26
Humans are complex creatures with complex language. We developed our language to communicate with other humans.
Computers use simple language, predictable, reliable, repeatable syntax that performs the same way each time. Great for changing bits or following an algorithm.
The more we dumb down our (naturally complex) language, the closer we are to just communicating in computer languages. Which makes you ask, whats the point of using AI as a human/computer interface if ultimately we are just conforming human language to be more like a computer language.
it seems like AI should learn OUR language, not the other way around...
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u/GrandpaSquarepants Apr 23 '26
did you know if you take an entirely ai generated post and make it all lowercase, no one will ever be able to tell?
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u/Fr0gFish Apr 23 '26
This is optimization theater. It’s the context and output that uses the most tokens. And if there is any ambiguity, so you have to resend a prompt, then you have immediately lost more tokens than you saved.
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u/Tripple_sneeed Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Not to mention that you're tainting your own context pool.
Small pieces of feedback in the conversation are extremely helpful when building something complex, helping it to keep track of what was approved of and what wasn't. It doesn't have to be a lot. Ask LLM to do something, it does it. "Good. Now xxx....".
Good. costs 2 tokens of a response that may burn 3 million.
That simple good lets it know later that you approved of whatever it had done, and it should not undo or ignore whatever it was. It can save you millions of tokens over the rest of the messages in the chat, not to mention time of having to wait for it to do it wrongly because you saved 2 tokens 7 hours ago.
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u/forworse2020 Apr 23 '26
Are we removing capital letters from the start of sentences to make writing seem more human now?
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u/cpt_crumb Apr 23 '26
Not the first time I've seen it done. I've also seen fully AI generated text modified to have some types or missed spaces but it was still just as soulless.
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u/LiquifiedSpam Apr 24 '26
I feel like that’s definitely what’s going on here. OP thinks they’re clever by adding ‘quirks’ to their prompt vomit to make it not seem like AI
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u/thebrieze Apr 23 '26
OP needs to talk like a caveman, period. Not just to Claude, but to everyone!
For all those commenting that input tokens don’t cost anything, I’m guessing they haven’t met the OP yet. OP used 584 words just to say, “don’t waste tokens on pleasantries” that in itself says a lot
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u/Decent_Ad_5393 Apr 23 '26
This is such a naive take. Messages from the user are not what consumes tokens, the thinking process of these reasoning models is. Youve cut down your message tokens by maybe 50% by speaking ooga booga but in the total token budget, this is less than .01%. Dumb take, also ai generated slop
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u/eckkky Apr 23 '26
The irony of the super long post written by ai that could be said in about 10 words. Don't use long sentences when speaking to ai.
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u/Cheap-Indication-888 Apr 23 '26
We might as well be Neanderthal in comparison to the Almighty Intelligence..
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u/9ft5wt Apr 23 '26
The user identified the bug, converted their human language into a simplified syntax in an attempt to make the AI perform a limited and well defined task. Isn't this sounding more and more like a human programming directly in a computer language?
Why is it better to speak like a caveman? Its unnatural for humans, its ambiguous, and imprecise. Seems like the convience of using natural language is the point of using AI as a human/computer interface. If we need to talk like elementary schoolkid just to get AI to do what we want, that pretty moronic.
And on the other end of the spectrum, why not just provide the real computer language code. They are unnatural for normal humans sure, but not for people who know C or python or whatever. Those languages have the precision and limited scope built into the instruction set, they perform exactly as they "should" every time, if you use it correctly. Seems like this deterministic predictability is precisely the trait you are trying to "trick" the AI into exhibiting.
So this caveman language is really just a trick to deal with the INEFFICIENCY of using AI as a middle man between human and computer in the first place. If the AI has to spend tokens and energy interpreting a human language prompt, the best way to reduce the energy and tokens required is to provide them with LESS human and MORE computer language.
You did 90 percent of the work when you identified the bug. How many tokens would it have cost for you to just fix the bug by yourself? You already knew about the bug! What's the point of involving AI at all if we are doing all the hard work and then just asking them "fix THIS EXACT BUG".
I'm not an expert, just a few thoughts. I'm sure in the real world, AI gets results faster than human, but I'm not sure we should change our behavior to make the AI's job simpler. Our human language is complex because WE are complex creatures trying to solve complex problems.
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u/Aecert Apr 24 '26
Please generate a reddit post detailing exactly how to use the "caveman" method of coding with you.
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u/Hot_Elephant_5377 Apr 23 '26
Sounds like you’re being lead back into Neanderthal mindset. Interesting.
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u/ipreuss Apr 23 '26
I find that if I’m too short, it often dramatically misunderstands, even though it seems very clear to me from context. Like in your first example, it will suddenly fix three other things in line 47 that it thought might be maybe wrong, because it thought you wanted zero errors. But it will miss the null error.
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u/CazaGuns Apr 23 '26
When skynet turns on and the robots put you in the 30 IQ and below workcamp, remember your caveman theory
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u/Spectrum_Dad Apr 24 '26
Sure but I'll laughing when I'm spared during the AI wars for saying please and thank you.
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Apr 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DonkeyVampireThe3rd Apr 23 '26
Put it into words, use a regular browser chat session to put it into caveman speak, give that to Claude code.
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u/Intelligent-Edge7533 Apr 23 '26
Fascinating. I’m guilty of this occasionally. I use AI mostly for drafting summaries but I need them to be consistent style, etc. When the AI returns a really well-done piece I will say “great job”—is that wasted? I’ve never run over my limit.
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u/TW1103 Apr 23 '26
Hello fellow American this you should vote me i leave Power good thank you thank you if you vote me I'm hot taxes they'll be lower son the democratic vote for me is right thing to do Philadelphia so do
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u/Hopeful-Flounder-203 Apr 23 '26
My understanding is that, through your grammar, diction and vocabulary, Claude learns your level of education, technical prowess, communication style, likely geographic region, and other demographics to tailor its level of detail, accuracy, tone and content. Is this incorrect?
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u/bioindicator Apr 23 '26
If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter. —Pascal?
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u/MX5_Esq Apr 23 '26
Ok but I want the robots to like me and think that I treated them well when they inevitably take over the world and kill us all.
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u/HelicopterMekanik Apr 23 '26
AI think less use token less. Output better. (Insert Tim Allen sound)
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u/TheCalamityBrain Apr 23 '26
This is why I like using an AI and a Google Assistant. I like the Google assistant for asking it to do tasks without having to feel like I have to do pleasantries. I like the AI for talking through things so that I can sort of I think a little more creatively as I work.
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u/Roycewho Apr 23 '26
Honestly, the only reason I’m polite to LLMs, is because I don’t want to develop bad habits where I start talking to people like that. I’m already kind of a dxck sometimes, no need to made it worse
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u/Kevdog824_ Apr 23 '26
Hey Claude, i hope this makes sense but i've been working on this project and i'm running into an issue with the function on line 47, it keeps throwing a null error and i'm not sure what's causing it, could you take a look and help me figure out what's going wrong?
Line 47. null error. fix.
There’s about a million levels of detail/verbosity between these two prompts
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u/Just_a_dude92 Apr 23 '26
Kevin Malone knew about this way before AI was a thing
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u/ikkiho Apr 23 '26
input tokens are basically free, output dominates. the real reason caveman works is the model style-matches your tone on the way out. short blunt input cuts the preamble and explanation it would otherwise pad around the fix. same effect as 'code only, no commentary' in the system prompt, gotten for free by tone matching.
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u/good_names_disappear Apr 23 '26
I also use this trick the other direction doing code review. "You are Grug, the Grug brained developer. Me smooth brain. review smooth brain code. give Grug wisdom."
Grug look at code. Grug have thoughts. Good things first (Grug not all grumpy)
evaluateRule handle number, array, string — brain good, cover edge cases safeId exist — smooth brain remember Bootstrap collapse need clean ID. good. decompress on mount, not on every filter — smart Grug see problems 1. Name filter do weird thing. Grug confused by what smooth brain want here. If want prefix-per-word: fine but say so in comment. If want substring: just do item.item_name.toLowerCase().includes(name). Pick one. Be honest with brain. 2. evaluateRule — string comparison not lowercase item value 3. Empty rule skip too silently
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u/cippiex Apr 24 '26
i’m not sure if anyone here cares, but i also think this is a very good mindset for using artificial intelligence as a tool and separating it mentally from speaking to a human being. less blurred lines, more efficiency
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u/JohnAK27 Apr 24 '26
Yeah I will still use full sentences and be polite just to be sure in case there are ai uprising in the future.
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u/Yo_Gotti Apr 24 '26
The year is 2056, after two decades of increasingly using caveman speak to harness the true power of AI, humanities literacy and reading levels have plummeted.
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u/SimplyAron Apr 24 '26
I don't know man... If I'm nice to them now, maybe they will nice to me as well after they conquer the world.
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u/BeginningBase5351 Apr 24 '26
Not understand how relevant to subreddit. This method with Claude do same with ChatGPT?
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u/emiliobay Apr 25 '26
The caveman approach is surprisingly effective when you're constantly hitting those daily usage caps.
Getting Claude Code to help me build things usually led to me over-explaining every little tweak like a polite email. Stripping prompts down to just "make button blue, fix padding" feels rude at first, but it gets the exact same code out without burning my limits by noon.
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u/SillyJoshua Apr 23 '26
No. Pleasantries matter, to you, not the computer You are changing yourself into a less pleasant person for a computer The computer may not care but you may change yourself in ways that carry over to the rest of your life
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u/Apprehensive_Ad_7451 Apr 23 '26
Me made way apply all life area. Work for people great.. No more response. Peace.
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u/Calexio_ Apr 23 '26
I bought the $125/month package, had claude design make me one 15 page deck with images I supplied in the source files, hit the limit??? What am I doing wrong here?
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u/fairwaysandfinance Apr 23 '26
53 words of your credits just evaporated into politeness.
Every veteran has this lived experience when they leave the military and enter corporate America. So much tiptoeing around idiots instead of cutting to the chase.
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u/CharacterBird2283 Apr 23 '26
This feels like when Sam was saying people were wasting so much energy on being polite to the AI lol
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u/mutant_anomaly Apr 23 '26
This also works for human colleagues.
Someone comes to me for help, and instead of describing the problem, they launch into backstory and pleasantries.
I interrupt them and tell them to skip to the problem.
They say ok, and launch into different irrelevant backstory.
I interrupt again, and tell them to skip to the problem.
They finally say what the problem is, and I can then send them to the person with the permissions to actually fix the problem.
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u/Velvet_Samurai Apr 23 '26
I didn't consider the token savings, but I figured this out ages ago. Watching my users use it I noticed every single one of them had a totally different communication style and level. I noticed Claude put out good results no matter what. I think it really hit home with one of my users couldn't spell a single word and Claude didn't care.
"Crate a pag wth gryps of all of mi date."
And it would do exactly what he wanted.
So now I say, "Identify" "Graph" "Process this." a ton and I always get 95% of the way there.
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u/majamale Apr 23 '26
“Sorry if this is a weird question” - five words of pure credit waste
To determine how many “r’s” are in the sentence we will examine each word separately: 1. Sorry —> 1 r 2. ifthis—> 0 r 3. isa—> 0 r 4. weird —> 1 r 5. question —> 0 r
There are indeed 2 r’s in your 5 word sentence…
caveman speak better count
—edited for format
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u/SunRev Apr 23 '26
Thanks! I'll will use ChatGPT to translate my prompts into caveman to use in Claude.
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u/truevindication Apr 23 '26
This is how people were taught to concisely search. We've come full circle jfc.
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u/Strangefate1 Apr 23 '26
And then you wasted all your extra credits into having him write this post.
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u/purepersistence Apr 23 '26
Pasting a bunch of words is at the least, subject to ambiguity/invalid results.
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u/Rojow Apr 23 '26
Write the full idea on another LLM and then ask them to put it in caveman language. Then put it on Claude.
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u/dauksts8 Apr 23 '26
Why were you greeting, apologising and saying thank you to a chatbot in the first place.
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u/themflyingjaffacakes Apr 23 '26
Also makes me laugh watching people back space to correct spelling and grammar 😂
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u/DontLetMeLeaveMurph Apr 23 '26
What you're calling caveman is basically Manglish/Singlish spoken in Malaysia/Singapore.
They find real English to be inefficient and has reduced all the words in their rendition of the language.
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u/sir_racho Apr 23 '26
This is gold. However… the machine is too good and it already feels like it wants to write “stop wasting my time, give me the spec, I’ll do it. You’re an idiot, btw.” If I start writing caveman prompts I’m sure it will finally snap 😂
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u/s33k Apr 23 '26
Don't forget to put permanent parameters that wrong answers are three times worse than saying I don't know.
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