Trending on Reddit: Claude Users Claim 75% Token Savings by Making the Model "Talk Like a Caveman"
What Happened
A post on r/ClaudeAI demonstrates prompting Claude to respond in terse, grammatically stripped "caveman" English, reporting roughly 75% fewer output tokens with negligible quality loss on coding and analysis tasks. The thread accumulated over 10,000 upvotes and 400 comments as users replicated results and shared variants.
My Take
The community framed this as a cost hack, but it's really a quiet indictment of how much filler modern chat models produce by default. If grammar is optional, most of what we pay for is performance theater — polite scaffolding aimed at sounding smart. Labs will not copy this aesthetic, but they will quietly ship "concise mode" defaults within a quarter, and API pricing pages will start advertising output-token reductions as a headline feature.
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