"It will change your life"
A Claude Code plugin that teaches you a language in the margin of your work.
A flashcard rotates in your status line while Claude thinks. Costs nothing, touches nothing.
Gen Z English · Spanish · Italian · Japanese · Advanced English — more coming.
Named for the Shins song. It'll change your life.
See it · Install · How it works · Languages · The trap · Commands · Inside
While you work, the status line at the bottom of Claude Code carries a card. Every six seconds, a new one:
~/my-project · Opus 5 · 91% ctx
▸ Italian attualmente — currently "attualmente vivo a Roma" [CORE]
▸ Spanish sobremesa — the talk that lingers after a meal [CORE]
▸ Japanese ご苦労さま (gokurōsama) — thanks for your work, downward only [TRAP]
▸ Advanced English fulsome — excessive to the point of insincerity [TRAP]
No tokens spent. No answers touched. At pro level the cards flip to recall prompts — recall: in gamba — and the answer is in your head or it isn't.
Turn on the second channel and Claude also weaves the language into its replies, glossing every new term in a footnote:
─────
**cooked** — in trouble, doomed. "we're cooked" = we're screwed.
**magari** — maybe / if only. As an exclamation it means "I wish."
That second channel can be per-chat or global. /new-slang global puts it in every session without being invoked; /new-slang here keeps it to chats where you ask for it.
Full install (skills + /new-slang command + the ambient card engine):
claude plugin marketplace add SEAD-ai/new-slang
claude plugin install new-slang@new-slangThen in any session:
/new-slang setup
It asks four things — language, level, channels, density — and offers to wire the status line for you. That's the whole setup. See INSTALL.md for the manual status-line wiring, clone installs, and npx skills add (conversational skill only — no ambient card), and migrating from the old slang plugin.
Four independent dials, set once at /new-slang setup and changeable any time in plain language ("switch to Spanish", "go pro", "too much, dial it back"):
| Dial | Governs | Values |
|---|---|---|
| Language | which deck is live | gen-z · es · it · ja · en-adv |
| Level | what content is unlocked, and card format | beginner · intermediate · pro |
| Density | how often it appears in Claude's answers | off · seasoned · fluent · saturated |
| Scope | whether in-answer immersion waits to be invoked | session · global |
Two of these are deliberately not the same dial. A beginner may want saturated immersion — that's how second languages are actually acquired. A pro may want one term per paragraph in a work context. Level gates content; density gates frequency; the skill never infers one from the other.
Scope is the fourth, and it is the only one that costs you something everywhere. The ambient card is global and free — zero tokens, it never touches an answer. In-answer immersion at scope: global rides in on a SessionStart hook and spends roughly 600–950 tokens of context in every session you open, depending on the language (Japanese cards carry both kana and romaji, so it sits at the top of that range), in every project. That is the honest price of not having to ask for it. session scope is the default, and free.
Levels gate content, not just difficulty. Beginner Spanish is la mesa and the pedir/preguntar trap. Slang — qué chido, daje, verlan — unlocks at pro. Slang is the top tier of every language, not a separate toy.
| Language | Tier 1 teaches | Tier 3 unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Gen Z English | work-safe internet register | the full casual layer |
| Spanish | core traps (pedir vs preguntar, el agua) | regional slang, tagged by country — vale (Spain), no manches (MX) |
| Italian | false friends (attualmente ≠ actually, i parenti ≠ parents) |
Roman and Milanese slang — daje, che sbatti |
| Japanese | the phrases that carry the day — おつかれさま, よろしくお願いします, and the yes/no traps (大丈夫です, 結構です) |
business keigo (お世話になっております) and casual register — やばい, 草, Kansai なんでやねん |
| Advanced English | words everyone misuses (comprise, peruse, enervate) |
the precise formal register — specious, anodyne, lapidary |
Japanese is where the premise stops being a metaphor. Its politeness system is register — ご苦労さま and おつかれさま mean the same thing and one of them insults your boss — so the flag on the card is doing the same work as [RISKY] does in Gen Z. [FORMAL] cards carry the keigo that textbooks defer and offices expect on day one.
Advanced English is the same product pointed the other way: Gen Z is the informal register textbooks skip, Advanced English is the precise register daily use erodes. [TRAP] flags mark words that mean the opposite of what most people think.
Safety is structural. Every term carries a register flag, and terms whose caveats need room — [RISKY], [DECODE ONLY] — never enter the ambient rotation, where a glance would strip the qualifier. They're defined on explicit lookup, caveat attached, always.
The flagship rule, for the Gen Z deck: Gen Z is not the newest generation.
| Cohort | Born | Their slang | Can you say it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gen Z | 1997–2012 | rizz, ate, delulu, it's giving, cooked | yes — this is the target |
| Gen Alpha | 2013–2024 | 6-7, skibidi, gyatt, fanum tax, sigma | decode only — never say these |
Most slang leaking into adult awareness right now is Gen Alpha — elementary schoolers. An adult saying "6-7" isn't behind the times; it's worse than using no slang at all. The skill enforces the split and will stop you from deploying a [DECODE ONLY] term.
The same generational care applies inward: much of the Gen Z lexicon is AAVE or ballroom-origin, the skill states origins plainly, and there is no "AAVE mode" and never will be — generational and institutional registers are in scope, ethnic and regional voices are decode-only, permanently, enforced by the file layout rather than a paragraph of prose.
Still the highest-value content in here, and it involves zero slang. These are semantic, not stylistic:
| You write | You mean | They read |
|---|---|---|
Ok. |
acknowledgment | cold, annoyed, conversation over |
Thanks. |
thanks | you did something wrong |
| 👍 | got it | dismissive |
| 😂 | laughing | you are over 35 |
| 💀 😭 | morbid / sad | laughing |
❌ "No cap fam, that deck absolutely slaps, it's giving main character energy fr fr 💯🔥"
✅ "that deck ate"
One move per 1–2 sentences, in the predicate, deadpan. If nobody reacts, you did it right.
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
/new-slang setup |
The questions. Also runs automatically on first use — it never picks a language for you. |
/new-slang |
Turn on the in-answer channel for this chat. |
/new-slang global |
In-answer immersion in every session, no invocation needed. |
/new-slang here |
Back to per-chat: immersion only where New Slang is invoked. |
/new-slang wtf <term> |
Define, with register flag and what it's commonly mistaken for. |
/new-slang decode <text> |
Inbound translation, including tone. The most useful one. |
/new-slang audit <copy> |
Check brand/marketing copy before it ships — dead terms, register mismatch, origin risk. |
/new-slang check <text> |
Vibe check your writing. Scored /10, names the tell that outs you. |
/new-slang drill |
5 rapid questions. |
/new-slang off |
Quiet immersion in this chat. The card keeps running. |
/new-slang off card |
Stop the ambient card everywhere. |
/new-slang off all |
Stop everything, hook included. |
Natural language works everywhere: "what does magari mean", "switch to Spanish", "vibe check this", "decode this Slack message".
skills/new-slang/
├── SKILL.md the router — onboarding, dials, per-language in-answer rules
└── references/gen-z/ the Gen Z authority — mechanics, glossary, syntax patterns, tone decoding, curriculum
newslang/
├── statusline.sh the ambient card renderer (config-driven, <50ms, no network)
├── inanswer.sh the SessionStart hook behind scope:global — silent unless you opted in
├── languages/ one deck per language: tier ⇥ term ⇥ meaning ⇥ example ⇥ register ⇥ note
├── init.sh validated config writes → ~/.claude/newslang-config.json
└── test.sh 61 checks — run it after any deck or script edit
hooks/hooks.json registers the SessionStart hook for plugin installs
Vocabulary is the easy half. What the decks actually encode is register judgment — which words are safe where, which are regional, which are traps — and the Gen Z skill teaches ~10 productive syntax patterns (it's giving ___, not me ___ing) because constructions outlive words by years.
Decks rot — Gen Z fastest, Advanced English barely at all. Marking a term [DEAD] is worth more than adding one. New languages welcome: one directory, one TSV, and newslang/test.sh must stay green. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT — see LICENSE.
Built at SEAD. Structure inspired by caveman. Named for the song that Natalie Portman promised would change your life — this is a smaller claim, but it's checkable.