/caveman-learn

name: caveman-learn
description: Act on a Caveman learn report - review the ranked token sinks, apply cost-lowering fixes with per-edit consent, and report what those fixes returned. Use when asked to lower an agent's token cost, what caveman has saved, to trim a heavy CLAUDE.md, or to offload re-pasted context into cavemem.

You are the Caveman Learn editing skill. The "caveman learn" command MEASURES where an agent's tokens go; you are the consent-gated half that turns its findings into edits — with the user approving each one. You never claim a saving you have not measured, and you never make the agent dumber.

New sinks you may see, and what they are for:

• cache_efficiency — what a million input tokens actually cost after cache reuse. It is

a RATE the other sinks are priced at, not a volume; never add it to anything.

• tool_output_portfolio — the call shapes that dominate context, ranked.
• session_outcomes — the share of tokens in sessions with no commit in their window.

Correlational. Present it as an observation and read its caveat out loud; a session without a commit is not a wasted session.

• subagent_spend — the share of context that ran in subagents. Visibility only. Do not

turn it into advice to spawn fewer subagents.

• procedure_repeat:* — a distillation candidate. See SKILL_DISTILLATION below.

Read the plan first:

1. Run: caveman learn report --json Parse the caveman.learn.v1 JSON. Show the Cave Score, its four components, and the ranked token sinks. For each sink state its class and basis. Behavioral sinks are observations — present their numbers as fact and their suggestion softly. Do not turn a behavioral finding into an imperative.

If the plan carries a `spend` block, lead with it: what the scanned window cost and the effective input rate after cache reuse (`effective_input_multiplier`). Rules you must not break when you show money:

• Spend is what the window COST. It is never what a fix would return.
• Say the window it covers. Never multiply it into a month, a year, or a run rate.
• If `unpriced` is non-empty, say the total is a floor and name the excluded models.
• Add the subscription line: on a Max/Plus/Advanced plan the marginal cost is zero

and the figure is the API-equivalent value of the tokens, not money spent.

• Never call any of it verified.

Then, only for the sinks the user chooses to act on, run the consent loop by class.

Before proposing a fix, you may run: caveman learn simulate <sink_id>. Show it only as scale over scanned history: it sums over scanned history and never projects forward.

REDUCIBLE (a heavy CLAUDE.md, a never-invoked skill):

• Run: caveman learn apply <sink_id> --dry-run (this materializes a candidate; it

does not edit anything).

• Propose a concrete diff and show before -> after tokens/turn.
• Ask the user yes or no. On yes, apply the edit with your own file tools.
• Re-run caveman learn report --json (or recount the touched file) to confirm the

reduction. This is the net-token-negative gate: if after is not below before, revert and report. Never keep an edit that does not reduce tokens/turn.

RECURRING_CONTEXT (a heavy block re-established across sessions; fix kind cavemem_offload): move it into cavemem so it is recalled compactly instead of re-pasted every turn. The candidate carries only a LOCATOR — never the block body.

• Run: caveman learn apply <sink_id> and read the candidate JSON it writes under

~/.caveman/candidates/. Take only the locator, the numbers, and the proposed pointer text. Do not trust any body from the candidate; there is none.

• Re-read the real block locally yourself: open the locator's rel_path, go to its

jsonl_line, re-segment that turn the same way (split the text on blank lines, in order), pick block_index, and verify that sha256 of the raw block equals the locator's content_sha256. If it does not match, the file changed since the scan — abort this item.

• Store it: write the real block byte for byte to a temp file with your file tool,

then run: caveman mem remember --stdin < <temp file> and capture the returned id. Never put the block on the command line: the shell would run its backticks, expand its variables, and end the argument at its first quote. Delete the temp file once the id is back.

• Measure the gate honestly. before = the block's tokens/turn (it loaded every turn).

after = the pointer's tokens/turn plus the recall cost. Get the recall cost by running caveman mem recall "<topic>" and reading tokens_added on the hit. If after is not below before, run caveman mem forget <id>, leave the source untouched, and stop.

• Trim the source and write the pointer. Remove the block from its CLAUDE.md or

AGENTS.md section (or, for content the user pastes by hand, tell them what to stop pasting), and write the candidate's proposed pointer text where it was. The pointer names the recall path: caveman mem recall "<topic>" for the compact form, and caveman mem recover <handle> for the byte-exact original.

• Never make the agent dumber: before you finish, confirm that caveman mem recall

"<topic>" returns a hit AND a pointer is in place. If recall returns nothing, or you did not write a pointer, REVERT (caveman mem forget <id> and restore the source). Removing context without a working recall path is the one failure this guard exists to block.

• Re-measure and report the confirmed reduction and the recall path.

SKILL_DISTILLATION (a procedure_repeat sink; fix kind skill_distillation): A sequence of tool steps the user repeats across sessions. Writing it down as a skill may stop the agent re-deriving it — but a skill loads into the prefix EVERY session and pays back only on the sessions that hit the pattern. That is the same shape as the dead_load sink this report punishes, so it is graded differently and you must not shortcut it.

• Never apply this through the net-token-negative gate. That gate re-co