‘Talk like a caveman’ prompts save tokens, but far less than promised

Developers looking to curb the cost of AI-powered coding tools have increasingly turned to the “Caveman” prompting style, which instructs coding assistants to communicate in blunt, telegraphic language and avoid conversational padding. The theory is simple: fewer words mean fewer tokens, translating into lower inference costs for organizations deploying AI agents at scale. A new test from IDE maker JetBrains confirms that terse prompting styles such as the viral open-source Caveman project can r