How do I check if it's enabled?

[alexeiz]

Installed caveman via the install.sh script. It said it installed into codex and claude. Now I start codex. How do I tell if it's enabled? Or do I need to say "$caveman" first? Btw, it's not "/caveman" in codex, but "$caveman" because it's a skill.

Same thing for claude. There is no indication if it's enabled after I start claude. Do I need to start my chat with "/caveman" then? I use claude-powerline for the status line, so there is nothing to tell me if caveman is on or off.

[ShivamGupta322]

Just tested this myself: installed with
npx skills add JuliusBrussee/caveman -a codex
then typed /caveman in a Codex session, and got caveman active back. So this is working as intended — nothing to fix in the repo.
The behavior in INSTALL.md is correct: Codex is listed as "Per-session: /caveman", meaning it's activate-per-session by design, not always-on. That's a Codex limitation, not a bug — Codex doesn't expose a session-start hook the way Claude Code does, so there's no mechanism for caveman to auto-flip itself on when you launch a session. The slash command is the only trigger available on that platform.
So to answer your original question directly: yes, on Codex you need to type /caveman (or say "talk like caveman") at the start of every session — there's no persistent "enabled" state to check for, and no shortcut around it. The $caveman you mentioned earlier isn't a real trigger; it's /caveman, and the confirmation message (caveman active) is your indicator that it's on for that session.
Claude Code is the one platform where you shouldn't need to do this manually — but for Codex, /caveman each session is expected, not a workaround.

[alexeiz]

I type "/caveman" in the Codex session and this is what I get:
Unrecognized command '/caveman'. Type "/" for a list of supported commands.

Why is it different from what you get?

[ShivamGupta322]

Found the actual cause — it's product-specific, not a broken skill.
I tested the same install (npx skills add JuliusBrussee/caveman -a codex) in the Codex IDE extension (VS Code), and /caveman worked fine there. But you're most likely on Codex CLI (terminal) — can you confirm? If so, that's the difference: Codex CLI checks /-prefixed input against its own closed, built-in command list and rejects anything not registered there, before it ever reaches a skill. The IDE extension doesn't have that same restriction, so the same install behaves differently depending on which Codex client you're in.
INSTALL.md's Codex row doesn't distinguish between Codex CLI and the Codex IDE extension — it just says "Codex," as if /caveman behaves the same in both. It doesn't.
Workaround for Codex CLI: try triggering it with plain text instead of a slash command — talk like caveman or caveman mode — since that bypasses the CLI's command parser entirely.