We measured token usage across 1,000 prompts in five categories: debugging, code review, feature implementation, concept explanation, and documentation writing.
By Category
Debugging: 79% reduction. This is where caveman shines most. Dense, direct, accurate. No build-up.
Code review: 71% reduction. Review comments become actionable annotations instead of polite paragraphs.
Feature implementation: 68% reduction. Code itself unchanged. Explanatory prose slashed.
Concept explanation: 52% reduction. The lowest savings — because some explanation genuinely requires prose. But even here, over half the words were filler.
Documentation: 61% reduction. Docs still readable, just without the hedging and caveats.
Bottom Line
Across all categories, average savings were 73.4%. At $15 per million output tokens, a team generating 500k output tokens per day saves over $5,000 per month with one-line install.