laconic

A Claude Code plugin that makes Claude reply like a human texting a trusted colleague on Slack — short, plain, answer-first — instead of writing essays.

Built as an antidote to Opus 4.8's verbosity: the endless preamble, the "honest take" hedging, the wall of text to a yes/no question, the stalling to ask permission for the obvious next step.

How it works

It ships a UserPromptSubmit hook. On every message you send, Claude Code runs inject.mjs, which prints style.md into the model's context right before it responds — so the rule stays fresh and never fades over a long conversation.

No output judging, no redo loops, no per-turn model cost. It just makes the style instruction unmissable, every turn — which is exactly the mechanism people report actually works, since a CLAUDE.md note decays as the session grows.

Install (plugin)

/plugin marketplace add Vijeth-Rai/laconic
/plugin install laconic@laconic

Restart Claude Code. Done — works on any machine, no paths to edit.

Install (manual hook)

If you'd rather not use the plugin system, add this to ~/.claude/settings.json (all projects) or a project's .claude/settings.json, pointing at your clone:

{
  "hooks": {
    "UserPromptSubmit": [
      { "hooks": [
        { "type": "command", "command": "node \"/path/to/laconic/inject.mjs\"" }
      ]}
    ]
  }
}

Tune it

Edit style.md. Takes effect on the next message — no restart.

Requirements

Node.js (any recent version).