“Barcelona good. Sagrada Família, three days are enough, tapas in the evening.”: That’s what an answer sounds like if you put ChatGPT or Claude into caveman mode. Max Fröhlich, a mathematics doctoral student, brings the example to MeisterPrompter. He shares tips on using AI on social media and has also tried out the viral caveman mode from developer Alexander Huso. From his perspective, it helps save tokens.
“Caveman mode”: Only the bare essentials end up in the output
The idea behind it: The AI should respond like a “caveman”. Only what is necessary is communicated. The input is intended to output extremely shortened and simplified language – based on the idea that Stone Age people spoke this way.
According to Fröhlich, this reduces the consumption of output tokens. This is practical considering the opaque usage limits for AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. These output tokens are also significantly more expensive than the input tokens. Users consume these with their input.
Handle complex tasks without “nonsense”.
Although Fröhlich gives the vacation example, in everyday life he uses caveman mode for programming and for complex tasks. He wants to reduce the “chatter” of the AI. This is also relevant for companies that want to reduce costs for AI use.
The hack is not very suitable for creating texts. Whether caveman mode makes sense for coding is controversial. The developer Huso saw reduced quality in code generated in this way.
The hack also does not replace appropriate prompting with a clean structure. You can get more hacks for prompting weekly at MeisterPrompter. In the current and linked episode you will also find out which AI tools Fröhlich uses.
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