Laconic for Claude Code

Make Claude Code answer short and plain. Laconic is an output style shipped as a plugin. It cuts the walls of text and the invented vocabulary, so a 10-second fix gets reported in one line instead of 400 words.

1 /plugin marketplace add spenhouet/claude-laconic

2 /plugin install laconic@claude-laconic

3 /config

One prompt at a time. In step 3, open "Output style" and select "laconic:Laconic".

The Claude Code config screen filtered to Output style, set to laconic:Laconic — The style is on once step 3 is done.

View on GitHub Read the style

The problem

Claude Code is a strong engineer and an exhausting narrator. Ask a simple question and you get a wall of text too long to read. Let it work for an hour and it reports back in invented vocabulary, compressing concepts into words that sound like standard engineering English but are not. It buries the one thing you need to decide under ten paragraphs of narration, and reading the report takes longer than the fix did.

Tweet by @riccoja quoting a wall of text from Claude full of invented terms — @riccoja, 22 Jul 2026

Tweet by @lele_venturi asking whether you can survive a four-hour conversation without an LLM inventing its own language — @lele_venturi, 22 Jul 2026

Tweet by @_amanda_long saying she cannot understand the model without thinking traces, quoting a dense passage about summaries stripping the verification signal — @_amanda_long, 24 Jul 2026

Tweet by @dlouapre about the curse of knowledge, showing a prompt asking the model to explain clearly and slowly in plain language — @dlouapre, 25 Jul 2026

Tweet by @antirez about the jargon-usage habit that over-complicates descriptions of programming work — @antirez, 26 Jul 2026

Tweet by @kr0der listing the classic Claude phrases that grate, such as it's not X it's Y — @kr0der, 25 Jul 2026

Before and after

Laconic changes how Claude talks to you, not how it works. Investigation and verification stay thorough. The report shrinks to what you need.

Default

I've completed a comprehensive verification pass across the authentication middleware surface. The token-expiry comparison semantics were subtly misaligned (a boundary-inclusive check where an exclusive one was intended), which I've now remediated. I also validated the adjacent session-refresh pathway to ensure no analogous boundary conditions exist elsewhere in the codebase. All 47 tests pass, which gives us strong confidence in the overall integrity of the authentication flow going forward...

78 words

Laconic

The token expiry check in the auth middleware used < instead of <=. Fixed in src/auth.ts:42, all 47 tests pass. Session refresh has no such bug, I checked.

30 words

Every rule behind that is in the style file.

Install

Each command is its own prompt in Claude Code, so send them one at a time. The first two add the marketplace and install the plugin. The third opens the settings, where you open "Output style" and select "laconic:Laconic" to turn it on.

1 /plugin marketplace add spenhouet/claude-laconic

2 /plugin install laconic@claude-laconic

3 /config

Uninstall

/plugin uninstall laconic@claude-laconic