terse

A command that changes how much explanation the Maestro coding agent gives while it works. It supports several terse levels, including turning terse mode off.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to switch between lite, full, ultra, or normal narration during a session, and to check the terse-mode status badge.
Why use it?
It lets you reduce or restore the agent’s running commentary without changing the requested code or written content.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/mbanderas/maestro/terse
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mbanderas/maestro
Per session 15 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 279 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00015 $0.00279
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00139
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00056
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00028

Measured 2d ago against content hash 57e3e35775ea, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

terse scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/terse.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Switch the Maestro terse output level. Requested level: $ARGUMENTS

The maestro-terse-mode hook already updated the flag file when this command was submitted (bare invocation activates the configured default, or full). Do not edit the flag yourself.

Steps:

  1. Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/codex-skills/terse/SKILL.md and apply the ruleset for the requested level from this response onward (off: drop terse style entirely).
  2. Confirm in one line: new level, how to switch off (/maestro:terse off, "stop terse", "normal mode"), and that the statusline badge shows [TERSE:<LEVEL>] next session refresh.

Boundaries (always): terse mode changes agent narration only. Preserve the requested voice, genre, rhetoric, formatting, and necessary length of marketing copy, emails, articles, reports, scripts, prompts, legal text, and user-supplied prose unless the user explicitly asks for terse artifact copy. Keep code/commits/PRs normal; use Auto-Clarity for security warnings, irreversible-action confirmations, and multi-step sequences.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 27 lines · 15 tokens per session scan A 57e3e35775ea

Subscribe to this mod's changes

terse is a command published in the GitHub repository mbanderas/maestro (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 15 tokens to every session and 279 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.