What is laconic?

Laconic is a plugin for Claude Code, the command line coding assistant made by Anthropic, that changes how the assistant replies in conversation. Instead of long, hedged answers full of preamble, it aims to make Claude respond the way a person might text a trusted coworker on Slack: short, direct, and leading with the answer. The author built it as a response to a specific frustration, that some versions of Claude tend toward wordy replies, extra caveats before giving a straightforward yes or no, and asking permission for obvious next steps instead of just doing them. Technically, the plugin works through a hook called UserPromptSubmit, which Claude Code runs every time a user sends a message. That hook runs a small script, inject.mjs, which loads the contents of a file called style.md and injects it into the model's context right before it responds. Because this happens on every single message, the style instruction stays fresh throughout a long conversation instead of fading the way a one time instruction in a project's configuration file tends to. There is no separate step that judges the output or asks the model to redo a reply, and no extra cost per turn beyond the hook itself. There are two ways to install it. The simpler path uses Claude Code's own plugin system with two commands to add the marketplace and install the plugin, after which a restart of Claude Code is all that is needed, with nothing to configure by hand. The alternative is a manual hook added to a settings file that points at wherever the project is cloned on disk. Once installed, the actual behavior rules live in the style.md file, which can be edited at any time and takes effect on the very next message with no restart required. The only requirement to run it is a reasonably recent version of Node.js.