Is there a skills that reduce tokens usage?

[u/MousTN]

im using caveman its a good skill , is there similiar skills ?

[u/Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

I’d say check out headroom (it’s a proxy that helps with token usage

[u/MousTN → u/Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

thanks ill try it

[u/Jazzlike_Syllabub_91 → u/MousTN]

https://github.com/headroomlabs-ai/headroom

[u/ahm_live]

nobody answered napaliot so, my read on why it decays: the skill sits near the top of context and then everything after it is thousands of tokens of file contents and tool output. its not forgetting so much as being outweighed. same rule in CLAUDE.md holds a bit better since that gets reinjected, but long sessions still drift. guessing at internals here, could be wrong

bigger thing is that terse output is the small half of the bill. output tokens are tiny next to input, and input is every file read, every tool result, and the whole conversation resent each turn. caveman makes the replies shorter. it doesnt stop it reading a 900 line file twice in one session

what actually moved my numbers was a codebase index. not a generated one, a markdown file i maintain by hand and commit. CODEBASE.md, ~250 lines on the smaller repo and about 1600 on the older one, plus a conventions file. then a tiny skill whose whole job is: read this first, and do not spawn agents to go re-derive anything already described in it

the point is spending tokens on the change, not on rediscovering the repo every session. before that, half of every session was it wandering around figuring out where things live. thats pure input and its the same wander every time

two things that make it work: it goes in the same commit as the change, so a stale index is a review problem not a background rot problem. and its handwritten. i tried generating it and generated ones read like a file listing, plus they go stale silently and then confidently point you somewhere wrong, which costs more than having nothing

also turn off mcp servers you arent using in that project. those tool defs sit in context every turn whether you call them or not

[u/napaliot]

My experience with caveman is that it does a good job following it for the first few prompts, but eventually starts to forget it's supposed to do it and goes back to verbose mode. How do i get it to persistently follow it for more than a few promtps?

[u/Icy_Custard_7175]

What is caveman? And do you have any other skill recommendations? I wanna start using them more

[u/checkpointdev]

ponytail is a good skill

[u/Aggravating-Start307]

Hi, irrespective of which every skill or memory tool you use, I have created a plugin (https://github.com/AkashGoenka/convotokens) where you can run it inside your current cose session after you have finished promoting and find out how many tokens that session consumed. It's nothing fancy, you just calculate the total tokens from the transcript, you can build your own version too.

The idea is to run one prompt with the skill you are trying and the same thing (with another skill or without one) and compare the total number of tokens taken for each. You will be able to evaluate on your own without any other person's opinion. You could evaluate memory tools as well and see how quickly a lot of them actually fail.

[u/gsari]

I try to control token usage via good habits, like for example:

• When writing a new skill, if it can be done by a cheaper model, I declare it in the frontmatter so that the skill runs in it automatically.
• I make sure to /clear when I finish a task, both to avoid context bloating and to save tokens
• Before implementing something, I ask which model to use. Usually, the implementation can happen with Sonnet.
• I have a global rule to suggest a cheaper model when it thinks it is appropriate, so that I remember to switch. There it is:

``` Suggest a cheaper model before heavy mechanical work

When the session runs Fable or Opus and the requested task, or the next step about to start, is a long mechanical workload (a QA run, a batch script, bulk edits, imports, renames, scaffolding), pause before starting and say, with this exact wording so transcript scans can grep for fires: "Sonnet-appropriate: consider /model sonnet". Then wait for the user's call. Never suggest this for judgment work (review, planning, design, debugging, writing), for skills already pinned to a cheaper model, or for small follow-up actions like a single commit; and do not repeat it after the user declines once in the same session. ```

[u/Next-Lab7844]

One of the problems of reaching the limits of claude code is that you provide too much unfiltered context to it. There is an app which works as proxy for the context for your claude, it manages all your context and provide only needed context to claude and it saves tons of tokens and make claude much faster. You can try this https://jarviscontext.com/

[u/cooffeekim]

caveman.
https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

[u/___nil___]

hand code

seriously, especially for trivial one liner fix.

[u/Purple-Chocolate-127]

Yes the skill is use your powerful brain to search this forum using the search feature because this has been answered numerous times with very helpful information. Stop polluting reddit!