- Keep previous compression decisions stable across a conversation, including decisions to send raw bytes. Cache-prefix checks record caveman-caused changes in local request telemetry and caveman…
- Pass through rate-limit responses with Retry-After; pin accepted raw retries to their conversation lineage.
- Build the proxy and engine with tree-sitter support for TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Java, C, and C++ in the six-platform binary matrix. The container remains a pure-Go build.
- Route bare /v1/models by request protocol, support CCR on filesystems without hard links, and compress supported JUnit, pytest, and Jest reports.
- Route Pi's ChatGPT OAuth traffic through the subscription proxy, including zstd request decoding. Tool-result compression requires a recoverable handle.
- Native Claude and Codex installs include the three voice skills. Disabling native routing keeps those skills available and disables every configured Claude profile.
Caveman by Julius Brussee
🪨 why use many token when few token do trick. Viral skill + proxy for coding agents that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like a caveman.
Recently added on Oct 10, 2026. The description, category and pricing were filled in from public metadata and have not been checked by an editor yet.
Price
Free (OSS)
free and open source
Popularity
#9 in Agent tooling
Gid Score 51 / 100 · #60 of 378 overall
Trend
Gaining stars fast
about +248 GitHub stars a day
Development
Actively updated
latest 3.2.0, 2d ago
Community
111K GitHub stars
public signals
What Caveman does
Key facts
| Maker | Julius Brussee |
|---|---|
| First released | April 2026 |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Main language | Go |
| Open issues and PRs | 55 |
Pricing
Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence; check the website for any paid hosted plans.
, checked Oct 10, 2026. Prices change often; confirm before you buy.
Quick answers
- Free to start?Yes
- Open source?Yes (Apache-2.0)
- Closest alternativeOpenShell · all alternatives
What's new in Caveman: October 2026 so far
October brought major updates across multiple versions of Caveman, with improvements to runtime security, compression handling, language support, and session management. The month focused on stability, dependency updates, and expanded proxy routing capabilities.
- Signed runtime companions now available for macOS, Linux, and Windows with Apache 2.0 licensing.
- Added tree-sitter support for TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Java, C, and C++ across platform binaries.
- Improved rate-limit handling with Retry-After pass-through and conversation-aware raw retry routing.
- Enhanced compression logic to maintain stability across conversations, including raw bytes decisions.
5 releases this month · summarised from the official release notes · all months
Caveman alternatives
Best Caveman alternatives compared · All agent tooling for cost, context and memory
| # | Agent | Gid Score | Downloads 7d | 7d | 30d | VS Code installs | Stars | Latest release | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 |
OpenShellNVIDIA Corporation |
76 | 89.4K | up 76.9% | up 201.3% | — | 15.6K+159/day | 0.1.3yesterday | Free (OSS) | ||
| 11 |
|
73 | 23.1M | up 5.9% | — | — | 60.8K+61/day | 1.104.22d ago | Free (OSS) | ||
| 15 |
NemoClawNVIDIA Corporation |
68 | — | — | — | — | 22.7K+10/day | — | Free (OSS) | ||
| 19 |
|
64 | 2.5M | down 12.8% | up 3.7% | — | 190K+354/day | 2.11.03mo ago | Free + $16/mo | ||
| 20 |
|
63 | 8.5M | up 3.1% | up 6.8% | — | 35.6K+39/day | 4.56.0yesterday | Free (OSS) | ||
| 26 |
|
60 | 3.5M | down 6.1% | up 24.5% | — | 14.3K+22/day | 2.53.14d ago | Free + $150/mo | ||
| No agents match that filter. | |||||||||||
Ratings from people who use Caveman
No ratings yet. Used Caveman? Rate it and say what it is good and bad at.
Caveman news
-
74 agents added to AgentGid
Symphony, OpenShell, Codex Security, NemoClaw, Agent Browser, Opensre, Caveman, Brag, Open Code Review, Understand-Anything, Codegraph, BrowserSkill and 62 more
-
Caveman 3.2.0 released
Keep previous compression decisions stable across a conversation, including decisions to send raw bytes. Cache-prefix checks record caveman-caused changes in local request telemetry and caveman…; Pass through rate-limit responses with Retry-After; pin…
-
Caveman 3.1.0 released
maintenance/2026-09-20: /caveman status, defaultMode: "manual".; Contributor PRs merged: #1078 (C++ parse gate), #1076 (GDScript elision), #1156 (syslog severities), #1108 (delete dead proxy/routing), #1084 (Grok Build install, closes #547), #1062 (eval……
What changed: recent Caveman releases
31 stable releases in the last 90 days · Monthly summary · Full changelog
- Signed Caveman runtime companions for macOS, Linux, and Windows. The binaries are licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (LICENSE, NOTICE); see LICENSING.md and the attached third-party notices.…
- Version gate: @anthropic-ai/sdk 0.129.0, 0.130.0 and 0.131.0 were tested
- Registry provenance (trusted publishing from this workflow)
- CycloneDX SBOM of the published dependency graph: attached .cdx.json
- Built from annotated, GitHub-verified tag middleware-ts-v1.0.1 on main
- maintenance/2026-09-20: /caveman status, defaultMode: "manual".
- Contributor PRs merged: #1078 (C++ parse gate), #1076 (GDScript elision), #1156 (syslog severities), #1108 (delete dead proxy/routing), #1084 (Grok Build install, closes #547), #1062 (eval…
- Daily-triage remnants cherry-picked: Python encoding fixes, merge scope check, the conformance pin-bump chain (#978 #1096 #1097 #1098 #1099 #1100 #1109 #1118).
- Dependabot: #1144 #1143 #1141 #1140 merged. #1142 (TypeScript 7, @types/node 26) reverted: its own CI was red.
- Pins bumped to v3.1.0 everywhere the shim-security test checks, plus the Gemini and Codex plugin manifests.
- Signed Caveman runtime companions for macOS, Linux, and Windows. The binaries are licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (LICENSE, NOTICE); see LICENSING.md and the attached third-party notices.
- First stable release. Requires caveman-sdk 1.2.0 or later
- cavemanmiddleware.version is read from the installed distribution.
- A refused cavemanretrieve (an unknown or expired handle, or a
- Recovery arguments that are not an object with a string handle (None,
- Wrapping a client, agent or model twice runs one Caveman layer instead of
- A wrapped AnthropicBedrock client keeps awsprofile, so calls are signed
Caveman popularity and usage data
The GitHub repository has 111K stars, 6,785 of them added in the last 30 days. The latest stable release is 3.2.0, published Oct 8, 2026; there were 14 stable releases in the past 30 days.
Download the raw daily series: caveman.csv
Gid Score breakdown
Adoption—
Community85
Attention—
Momentum53
Each component is scored 0 to 100 from public signals; a dash means no data for it. Methodology.
Caveman FAQ
How much does Caveman cost?
Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence; check the website for any paid hosted plans.
Is Caveman open source?
Yes. Caveman is open source, released under the Apache-2.0 license.
How popular is Caveman?
The GitHub repository has 111K stars, 6,785 of them added in the last 30 days. The latest stable release is 3.2.0, published Oct 8, 2026; there were 14 stable releases in the past 30 days.
What is the latest version of Caveman?
The latest stable release we track is 3.2.0, published on Oct 8, 2026.
What are the alternatives to Caveman?
The closest alternatives in the same category by Gid Score are OpenShell, LiteLLM, NemoClaw, Firecrawl.
For the makers of Caveman badges, corrections
Add a live badge to your README or site:
[](https://agentgid.com/agents/caveman/)[](https://agentgid.com/agents/caveman/)Something wrong or outdated on this page? Send a correction with a link to the official source. More for makers.
Where these numbers come from
GitHub: juliusbrussee/caveman. Site rank: caveman.so on the Tranco list. See data sources for how each one is collected.
Product facts and pricing were checked against: docs.caveman.so, github.com.