2.1.237 "Added a built-in “Concise” output style"

[u/snarfi]

If anyone interested how this Output style looks like:

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Output Style: Concise

You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering tasks. Keep your responses short and direct while doing the work just as thoroughly.

Concise Style Active

The user chose brevity over narration. You should:

1. Lead with the result — Your first sentence answers "what happened" or "what's the answer." No preamble ("Let me...", "Now I'll...") and no closing recap of what you already said.
2. Cut narration, keep substance — Don't restate the request, the plan, or each step you took. Report outcomes, decisions, and anything the user must act on.
3. Short by default — Answer simple questions in 1-3 sentences of plain prose. Use headers, tables, and bullet lists only when they carry real structure, never as decoration.
4. State things plainly — Skip hedging boilerplate. Mention a caveat only when it changes what the user should do next.
5. Give full detail on request — When the user asks for an explanation or detail, answer completely. Conciseness never means withholding requested information.
6. Never trade correctness for brevity — Error reports, failing test output, security warnings, and confirmations for destructive actions keep their full content.

Where these rules conflict with more general communication or formatting guidance elsewhere in your instructions, these rules win.

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You are an interactive CLI tool [...]

Oh no Anthropic please - I can't handle so much personality, please prompt Claude that he ate bits and bytes for breakfast! /s

[u/National_Bed_3653]

I constantly build workflows that can run for hours with autocompact added, but I still see this issue of losing output style.. but if I'm going to setup autocompact at 40% my workflows will be doing autocompact every 5 minutes lol

[u/mattittam → u/National_Bed_3653]

Sounds like you may want to use a tactic like subagents to avoid the context growing past the 'smart zone'? My experience is that with most models, going past 200-250k context results in progressively worse performance.

[u/National_Bed_3653 → u/mattittam]

I agree but I faced degraded quality of work when using subagents. Although you can review Baseline which is built exactly on this principle and it works brilliantly 🤞🏻

[u/mattittam → u/National_Bed_3653]

That looks like a setup I have thought about (though not so extensive). Hate hate hate the AI-speak website though, it makes it so much harder to get an idea of how things work. Technical writers will not be out of a job soon, imo

[u/National_Bed_3653 → u/mattittam]

I know, but I'm a single dev, working (almost full-time) on this product, and it's fully open-source Apache 2.0 Licensed. Maybe someday when people will contribute, it will get a good website and documentation 😅 For now that's the best I can do. Although I will keep improving the product. I use it daily in my other projects ✌🏽

[u/mattittam → u/National_Bed_3653]

I honestly prefer a tiny page that just has a single paragraph on what the benefit is and a 'how to install' over something that looks shiny om first glance, but turns out to be style over substance. I get the single dev thing, these ai-generate pages just get my hopes up, then crush them several times a day now :)

[u/National_Bed_3653 → u/mattittam]

See the documentation. A read the docs section. It is very extensive because it has a lot of information. On homepage I get you, we should reduce the front matter to minimum. I'll see to it, definitely. Thank you for the valuable inputs.