Caveman Compress

Purpose

Compress natural language files (CLAUDE.md, todos, preferences) into caveman-speak to reduce input tokens. Compressed version overwrites original. Human-readable backup saved as <filename>.original.md, but NOT beside the source file — it lives in an out-of-tree data dir ($XDG_DATA_HOME/caveman-compress/backups/<parent-dir-name>/, or %LOCALAPPDATA%\caveman-compress\backups\<parent-dir-name>\ on Windows) so skill auto-loaders don't re-ingest it as a live file.

Trigger

/caveman-compress <filepath> or when user asks to compress a memory file.

Process

1. The compression scripts live in scripts/ (adjacent to this SKILL.md). If the path is not immediately available, search for scripts/__main__.py next to this SKILL.md.

2. From the directory containing this SKILL.md, run:

python3 -m scripts <absolute_filepath>

3. The CLI will:

• detect file type (no tokens)
• call Claude to compress
• validate output (no tokens)
• if errors: cherry-pick fix with Claude (targeted fixes only, no recompression)
• retry up to 2 times
• if still failing after 2 retries: report error to user, leave original file untouched

4. Return result to user

Comp…