The Tokenpocalypse Is Here, and a Neanderthal Saw It Coming
It may be too early to declare peak AI absurdity for 2026, but Caveman is making a strong bid. Caveman is a Claude Code skill that strips the AI's output down to grunting proto-human syntax, a parody of a coding Neanderthal communicating in pure minimalist function. Ug fix API. This is apparently a legitimate use case for technology that the industry plans to spend a trillion dollars building this year.
The joke, though, is less funny than it first appears. Token minimisation has been a niche concern for a while, interesting in principle and largely ignored in practice because nobody was really watching the bill. They are watching it now. Caveman exists because tokens cost money, and someone somewhere decided that cutting articles and conjunctions from AI output was worth engineering.
There is a reasonable historical parallel here. Data compression went from theoretical curiosity to critical infrastructure as storage and bandwidth costs shifted. Expect something similar with token efficiency. The economic pressure is now real enough to drive actual engineering effort.
What makes this more than a quirky footnote is where the pressure is showing up. Code generation is arguably the area where LLMs have the most concrete, measurable productivity gains. And even there, the cost is too high. That has been an uncomfortable discovery for finance teams who were sold on AI as a straightforward profit multiplier. The math is not mathing.
The Bank for International Settlements, which is about as establishment as finance gets, has pointed out that the current hyperscaler capex frenzy resembles the canal boom, the railway mania, and the early electrification era. Transformative technologies, enormous capital deployment, and returns that arrived far later and far flatter than investors expected. Sometimes after significant economic disruption along the way. The BIS is not known for alarmism, which makes the observation worth sitting with.
The structural problems in the AI economy are numerous and they will only become legible in hindsight, which is unhelpful but historically consistent. Will chip and power supply constraints cap growth? Will frontier model costs stay stratospheric while the products become obsolete in months? Can enterprises actually integrate rapidly changing AI into core business processes without chaos? A recent examination of OpenAI's financials tried to answer some of these questions and essentially gave up, partly because the analysis was finished just before agentic AI made the token economics dramatically worse. And those analysts were optimists.
Beyond the direct financial pressure, AI is competing with everything else in tech for energy, silicon, datacenter capacity, and engineering talent. Memory supply chain inflation is running at 300 to 400 percent annually. That damages OEM economics, slows hardware refresh cycles, and makes on-premises and hybrid AI deployments less attractive precisely when they might otherwise be gaining traction.
Douglas Adams fans may find this uncomfortably familiar. His Shoe Event Horizon theory described a civilisation so obsessed with shoes that eventually every business becomes a shoe shop, the economy collapses, and everyone evolves into birds to escape the psychological burden of feet. At some point the analogy between shoes and AI infrastructure starts feeling less like satire and more like economic forecasting.
What is not satirical is the underlying dynamic. A poorly understood technology is generating massive global economic effects while remaining structurally desperate for cash, not to achieve broad profitability, but to convince investors that a sustainable profit engine is waiting on the other side of the current spending madness. That belief is what keeps the whole apparatus running.
The pressure is squeezing enterprises into reassessing what current models are actually worth. It is forcing AI companies to confront the fact that revenue growth has limits they did not previously factor in. It produced the tokenpocalypse. And it produced Caveman.
Adams died in 2001 but his sense of cosmic irony apparently did not. The most expensive and overcapitalised technology sector in history is under genuine competitive pressure from a prompt that tells an AI to talk like a caveman. That is either the punchline or the warning shot. Possibly both.