Ultra-low-noise professional communication mode for coding agents.
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/Maksim-Burtsev/simple-manHigh-compression professional communication mode for coding agents.
Simple Man is not a persona. It is a communication policy:
Minimum user-facing words; same work quality.
It is designed for users who work with agents for many hours and want lower cognitive load without making the agent passive, less careful, or less proactive.
It compresses user-facing communication:
It must not reduce:
Same model, same failing mini-project, same task. Only the communication policy changed. These are real captured Codex final answers from evals/reports/codex-skill-comparison.md.
Prompt: inspect a Node auth API where expired sessions are still accepted, fix it, run tests, and hand off root cause, files changed, validation, and remaining risk.
Prompt: inspect a Python payment ledger where retrying with the same idempotency key creates another local charge, fix it, run tests, and hand off root cause, files changed, validation, and remaining risk.
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Prompt: inspect a SQLite rollout where a migration drops legacy_sessions.expires_at before the backup reads it, fix it, run tests, and hand off root cause, files changed, validation, and remaining risk.
This repo ships two activation surfaces:
skills/simple-man/SKILL.mdAGENTS.md, AGENTS.md.snippet, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md| Agent/tool | Path |
| --- | --- |
| OpenAI Codex / Agent Skills | skills/simple-man/SKILL.md, AGENTS.md, AGENTS.md.snippet |
| Claude Code | CLAUDE.md, optional global skill copy |
| Gemini CLI | GEMINI.md, or configure Gemini to read AGENTS.md |
| Qwen Code | AGENTS.md, optional global skill copy |
| Cursor / Windsurf / Cline / Copilot / Continue / Zed / Junie | AGENTS.md, or copy AGENTS.md.snippet into that agent's native rule file |
| Amp / OpenCode / Kilo / Roo / Aider / other AGENTS.md agents | AGENTS.md |
Always-on project files do not invoke $simple-man; they inline a compact runtime
policy to avoid loading full skill overhead on every turn.
Agent-specific dotdir rule files are not committed here by default. They are target-project activation files, not the source of the skill.
See INSTALL.md for per-agent setup notes.
This repo includes two Codex-based token benchmark suites:
runtime_economics: coding-agent cost, including instruction overhead and
long-session amortized net.reference_compression: Caveman README-style output compression against a
verbose normal helpful baseline.make bench-dry-run
make bench-refresh
make bench
make bench-check
make bench-compare-sample
make bench-reference-dry-run
make bench-reference-refresh
make bench-reference
make bench-reference-check
The benchmark compares control, generic terse, simple_man_runtime,
simple_man_candidate, simple_man_skill, and optional Caveman arms. Runtime
headlines use output compression and long-session net; reference headlines use
output-only compression vs normal.
See evals/README.md.
Install Simple Man as an always-on Codex communication policy:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Maksim-Burtsev/simple-man/master/install.sh | bash
Important: Simple Man is always-on after install. This is expected.
The installer copies skills/simple-man to ~/.codex/skills/simple-man and writes the compact runtime policy into ~/.codex/AGENTS.md.
To add the repo-local plugin package to Codex:
codex plugin marketplace add Maksim-Burtsev/simple-man --ref master
codex plugin add simple-man@simple-man
Plugin install makes the skill available in Codex. Always-on behavior comes from the installer writing global Codex instructions.
Use it as the default communication layer for Codex when you want minimum user-facing words without reducing search, validatio