terse

terse is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mbanderas/maestro. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,027 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A response style that makes an agent's explanations shorter while preserving requested files, code, and other deliverables. It has lite, full, and ultra levels.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want brief agent messages, including through the listed commands or the /maestro:terse control.
Why use it?
It reduces unnecessary narration and token use when you only need concise progress updates or explanations.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the maestro plugin — 8 skills, 6 commands, 7 hooks shipped together

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 skills/mbanderas/maestro/terse
Any agent
npx skills add mbanderas/maestro --skill terse
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mbanderas/maestro

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install maestro, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 6 commands, 7 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for terse

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mbanderas/maestro/terse.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mbanderas/maestro/terse)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mbanderas/maestro/terse"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mbanderas/maestro/terse.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,027 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 $0.00055 $0.01027
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00513
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00205
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00103

Measured 4d ago against content hash 13ae5b56e12d, 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 4d 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.

codex-skills/terse/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Keep agent narration terse. Keep requested artifacts faithful.

Persistence

ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No revert after many turns. No filler drift. Still active if unsure. Off only: "stop terse" / "normal mode" / /maestro:terse off.

Switch: /maestro:terse lite|full|ultra|off.

Permanent default: set {"terseLevel": "<level>"} in the config file (%APPDATA%\maestro\config.json on Windows; $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/maestro/config.json or ~/.config/maestro/config.json on macOS/Linux). MAESTRO_TERSE_LEVEL env var overrides the file. The file is never created automatically — off until it exists.

Rules

Apply terse style only to agent narration, status updates, explanations, and handoff prose. Drop: articles (a/an/the), filler (just/really/basically/actually/simply), pleasantries (sure/certainly/of course/happy to), hedging. Fragments OK. Short synonyms (big not extensive, fix not "implement a solution for"). Technical terms exact. Code blocks unchanged. Errors quoted exact.

Artifact protection

Do not compress, fragment, abbreviate, or restyle an artifact the user asked you to create, edit, rewrite, or preserve. Follow the requested voice, genre, rhetoric, formatting, and necessary length for marketing copy, emails, articles, reports, scripts, prompts, legal text, and user-supplied prose. This boundary also protects other requested deliverables whose usefulness depends on their form.

Terse narration may introduce or hand off an artifact. The artifact itself stays normal unless the user explicitly asks for terse artifact copy, a shorter artifact, or compression of that artifact. A terse-mode setting alone is not such a request.

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

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. 4d ago First seen · 82 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 13ae5b56e12d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

terse is a skill published in the GitHub repository mbanderas/maestro (5 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,027 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

fetch-url

Fetch a single URL and convert its content to Markdown. Use when you need to read a web page, documentation page, or API reference without indexing it. The content is returned as plain Markdown text on stdout.

arabold/docs-mcp-server · 45 tokens

firebase-messaging

Use when setting up Firebase Cloud Messaging, managing permissions and tokens, handling background/foreground notification taps, or dispatching messages server-side (HTTP v1).

evanca/flutter-ai-rules · 35 tokens

karpathy-llm-wiki

Use when building or maintaining a personal LLM-powered knowledge base. Triggers: ingesting sources into a wiki, querying wiki knowledge, linting wiki quality, 'add to wiki', 'what do I know about', or any mention of 'LLM wiki' or 'Karpathy wiki'.

Astro-Han/karpathy-llm-wiki · 67 tokens

firebase-cloud-functions

Use when calling callable functions (httpsCallable), passing data to server-side logic, handling function errors/timeouts, configuring regions, or testing with the Emulator Suite.

evanca/flutter-ai-rules · 36 tokens

accessibility

Use when working on accessibility, a11y, WCAG, ARIA, screen readers, keyboard nav, focus order, contrast, alt text, captions, reduced motion, or target sizes; not language/culture/device (see inclusive-design).

evanca/flutter-ai-rules · 52 tokens

excalidraw-architect

Choose and compose the right Excalidraw diagram - architecture, flowchart, sequence, state, ER, swimlane, process, timeline, quadrant, pyramid, venn, loop, gantt, bar, line, scatter, and more - using the excalidraw-architect-mcp server. Use whenever a reader would learn more from a picture than from prose, or when…

BV-Venky/excalidraw-architect-mcp · 101 tokens