Caveman: cutting agent token bills by turning prompts into pictures

An open-source tool called caveman, by developer Julius Brussee, claims to cut around 65% of the tokens coding agents use. A related MIT-licensed tool, pxpipe, is reported to claim savings of up to about 70% on repeated skill text in Claude Code.

The unusual trick: caveman's convert command renders skill text into PNG pages, so the model reads its installed skills as an image instead of reloading the same text on every call. A dry run shows which skills would get cheaper. It also bundles context compression and a compact local browser.

The savings figures are the projects' own.

Why it matters

The cost of agents resending their context every turn is pushing developers towards strange optimisations, including exploiting the fact that image tokens can be cheaper than the same text. There's a quieter catch: instructions a person can't easily read now live inside images an agent acts on.