Philosophy & Ecosystem

cavekit

compressed spec-driven development for claude code
_{one file · one loop · zero sub-agents}

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what this is

Plan-then-execute forgets. SDD remembers — but most SDD frameworks bury that value under agent swarms, dashboards, and ceremony that costs more tokens than it saves.

Cavekit is the simplest full loop: grill → spec → research → review → build, over one SPEC.md file, no sub-agents. Three commands you run every time; four more you reach for only when the change earns it.

The spine is three properties that earn their tokens:

• durable spec — SPEC.md at repo root survives context resets. It is the agent's long-term memory: lose the window, reload the spec, keep going.
• caveman encoding — ~75% fewer tokens than prose. Symbols, fragments, pipe tables. All nine skill descriptions cost ~1.1k context — 16× lighter than spec-kit's 18.6k. That is the whole point.
• backprop reflex — every test failure becomes a §B entry; classes of bug become §V invariants the spec never forgets.

And one rule that keeps it from bloating into the frameworks it replaces: right-size. A one-line fix is just /build. The full chain is for genuinely uncertain or high-blast-radius work — never for a typo.

non-goals

• no sub-agents. Main Claude does the work.
• no dashboards. cat SPEC.md is the dashboard.
• no parallel workers. One thread, one spec, one diff.
• no JSON / YAML spec bodies. Markdown + pipe tables.
• no hooks, no orchestration binaries, no TypeScript helpers.

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ecosystem

Cavekit is one rock in the caveman family:

repo	what
caveman	output compression skill — why use many token when few do trick
cavemem	cross-agent persistent memory — why agent forget when agent can remember
cavekit (you here)	spec-driven build loop — why agent guess when agent can know
cavegemma	Gemma 4 31B fine-tuned on caveman pairs — why prompt every turn when weight remember

philosophy

The spec is the only artifact that earns its tokens. Everything else that costs tokens must either save more tokens later, or the user's attention, or it gets cut.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full v3 → v4 break.

license

MIT.