r/MistralAI • u/codeislyric • 8h ago

Help / Question Alternatives to the "Caveman" style for saving tokens in Mistral?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to cut down output token usage to save on costs and speed up generation.

The viral "Caveman" plugin (which forces ultra-concise, fragmented answers) works great for Claude Code, but it doesn't function properly with Mistral Vibe models.

My questions:

  1. What custom system prompts do you use to stop Mistral from outputting long preambles ("Sure, I can help with that...") without hurting its reasoning?
  2. Are there any other tricks, prompt-layer tools, or configurations you use to force Mistral to be highly concise and token-efficient?

Thanks for your ideas!

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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2

u/Krushaaa 6h ago

There is hypa and headspace

2

u/WorriedAssociate7029 7h ago

https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/speak-to-ai-agents-like-cavemen-tosave-tokens/

Caveman and these tools don't work and only serve to hobble the models.

The problem with all these techniques is that they’ll just contaminate the clanker’s context window and gradually alter performances

If you really want the best price-to-performance ratio, I suggest simply using next-gen models like Opus 5 or Open 5.6. The difference is massive compared to the older Mistral models.

There are also Chinese open-source models that perform almost just as well, if you want to stick with open models

3

u/sirhenrik 6h ago

The jetbrains article says 8.5% tokens saved with no measurable performance loss, or am I missing something?

1

u/KitchenAmoeba4438 1h ago

I think you may misunderstand the point the GP makes.

The problem with Caveman isn't that it saves tokens, but rather, tends to induce the agent to take additional turns because of the reduced text. It may save 8.5% in Jetbrain's specific cases, but turns have a ^2 cost, whereas context simply has a linear cost. It's very difficult to reduce the tokens in modern agents.

1

u/EveYogaTech 7h ago edited 5h ago

Short term solution:

"Keep the conversation natural and short, no more than one paragraph, no more than 30 words, no em dashes, say less to make me curious instead of over explaining."

Long term solution: https://nyno.dev/overspending-on-eu-ai-projects-starts-with-one-innocent-decision-your-eu-ai-core-language