Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

That's going to depend on what model you're using with Claude Code. All of the more recent Anthropic models (4.5 and 4.6) support thinking, so the number of tokens generated ("units of thought") isn't directly tied to the verbosity of input and non-thought output.

However, another potential issue is that LLMs are continuation engines, and I'd have thought that talking like a caveman may be "interpreted" as meaning you want a dumbed down response, not just a smart response in caveman-speak.

It's a bit like asking an LLM to predict next move in a chess game - it's not going to predict the best move that it can, but rather predict the next move that would be played given what it can infer about the ELO rating of the player whose moves it is continuing. If you ask it to continue the move sequence of a poor player, it'll generate a poor move since that's the best prediction.

Of course there's not going to be a lot of caveman speak on stack overflow, so who knows what the impact is. Program go boom. Me stomp on bugs.