Simple Man

High-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.

What it changes

It compresses user-facing communication:

• no preambles
• no praise
• no filler
• no repeated recaps
• no generic closing offers
• sentence fragments and compact labels when clear
• compact status updates
• compact final answers
• compact review findings
• compact explanations and plans

What it does not change

It must not reduce:

• repository search
• usage search
• dependency tracing
• impact analysis
• validation
• test/lint/typecheck effort
• proactive detection of related correctness issues

Examples

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.

Expired-session auth bug

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.

Payment idempotency retry bug

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.

Unsafe migration rollout order

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.

Agent support

This repo ships two activation surfaces:

• full skill: skills/simple-man/SKILL.md
• compact always-on runtime policy: AGENTS.md, AGENTS.md.snippet, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.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.

Benchmark

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

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.

Codex plugin package

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.

Recommended usage

Use it as the default communication layer for Codex when you want minimum user-facing words without reducing search, validatio