Only 12 of 39 skills carried metadata.version, and adoption tracked which plugin a skill lived in rather than any stated rule: core, gitea and lint were consistent adopters, bin and kyberforge were consistent non-adopters, git was split with one outlier. There was no documented convention, and skill-author's own bump logic was already written as if presence were conditional. metadata.version is now required on every skill. The 19 skills here that never carried one (bin, kyberforge, gitea-files) are seeded at 1.0.0, not 0.1.0 -- that value stays reserved for a skill's actual creation point under skill-author's existing convention. The skill-frontmatter pre-commit hook now fails a SKILL.md missing the field, the same class of failure as a missing name/description. Full rationale in the new ADR. The git-plugin skills that also need this field follow in the next commit, bundled with issue #113's rtk normalization since both touch the same files. Refs: #127 ADR: 0022 Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EeH8SCbcrCAQrtymkNuhKP
caveman
Ultra-compressed output mode: drop articles, filler and pleasantries, keep the technical substance exact.
What it does
Switches the agent into a terse register — no articles, no hedging, no pleasantries, fragments allowed, arrows for causality — while leaving technical terms, code blocks and quoted error strings untouched. The mode is sticky: once turned on it stays on for every subsequent response until the user says "stop caveman" or "normal mode", rather than decaying back to normal prose after a few turns.
It carries one built-in escape hatch. Security warnings, confirmations for irreversible actions, multi-step sequences where fragment order could be misread, and any request to clarify are answered in normal prose, then the compressed register resumes.
Hand-invoked only
SKILL.md sets disable-model-invocation: true. This is the single most important thing to know about this skill: the model cannot route to it. No other skill can hand off to it, and no phrasing in a user's request will cause it to be selected automatically. The only way in is the human typing /caveman.
That is deliberate — output style is the user's choice, not an inference the router should make on their behalf. It is also why the description reads as one plain human-facing sentence rather than carrying the trigger phrasing and boundary clause a routable skill needs.
Usage
/caveman
Then keep working normally. To leave the mode, say "stop caveman" or "normal mode".
Files
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
SKILL.md |
The whole skill — persistence rule, compression rules, worked examples, and the auto-clarity exception |