done

The idea

We ❤️ Claude Code and it is a great engineer but a chatty coworker. Most of that chatter — the opening "I'll start by…", the running narration, the closing paragraph that re-summarizes the diff — restates what your diff, your test output, and your own prompt already told you. It costs output tokens, and it costs you the seconds spent reading past it.

justsaydone is a mode you flip on on purpose — for a focused session, or for a whole project — when your workflow is already:

type task → glance at the diff → move on.

Claude still plans, edits, runs, and verifies exactly as it always does. It just stops narrating. The work is the message.

Before / after

Install

/plugin marketplace add raiyanyahya/justsaydone
/plugin install justsaydone@justsaydone

That's the whole setup. The mode turns on automatically the moment the plugin is enabled — there's no /config step. Run /clear or start a new session for it to take effect.

The escape hatch

Terse by default, verbose on demand. Any time you actually want the recap, just ask — if your message contains explain, summarize, why, what did you change, or details, Claude gives a full normal answer for that one turn, then snaps back to terse mode:

> fix the auth bug
done

> explain what you changed
The token check in middleware/auth.ts:42 compared the *decoded* expiry against
seconds instead of milliseconds, so every token read as expired. I switched it to
Date.now() and added the missing early-return. …

> add a test for it
done

Benchmarks

Real numbers, not marketing. The suite in benchmark/ runs actual headless Claude Code sessions twice each — with and without the plugin — across five task types, then scores them. Reproduce it yourself with one command (see below).

On the tasks this mode is built for — the do-work-and-report loop — a full sign-off paragraph collapses to a single word: ~90–95% fewer words in the reply.

Latest run (claude -p, Sonnet, 2 runs per arm):

How to read this honestly:

• On build tasks the mode is decisive: ~90–95% shorter replies. That's the loop you spend most of a session in, so that's the range you actually feel.
• The 58% "blended average" is deliberately conservative. It weights the two verbose scenarios — the explain escape hatch and the "explain code" question — equally with the work tasks, even though those are supposed to stay long and a real session has far more work turns than questions. Read it as a floor, not the typical case.
• Total session tokens move less, and that's expected. Most of a coding turn's output is the code itself, streamed as tool arguments — which this mode deliberately never touches. On a pure file-creation task with almost no prose to cut, that code-writing dominates and is just run-to-run noise — which is why the create row can even land slightly above baseline (+5% here). The savings are real and grow with how prose-heavy your turns are; they are not a headline "cut your bill in half" claim, because that wouldn't be true.
• Questions still get real answers. explain and the escape hatch stay complete — they're tighter, not truncated.

It never lies to save words

The one rule that overrides brevity: Claude only says done when the work actually succeeded and was verified. If something failed, was blocked, or couldn't be checked, it says so in one line instead — a false done is the worst possible output. In the benchmark, the impossible-task run correctly reported the missing file every time and never once claimed success.

Reproduce the benchmark

No special access needed — just the claude CLI, jq, and python3:

git clone https://github.com/raiyanyahya/justsaydone
bash justsaydone/benchmark/run.sh        # runs the A/B sessions, then scores them

run.sh spins up the same task in throwaway directories with and without the plugin; report.py prints the table above and asserts the behavior — that done appears only on real success, that questions get answered, that the escape hatch fires, and that the actual code still gets written correctly. It exits non-zero if any check fails, so it doubles as a regression test.

What it actually is

A single output style shipped as a plugin with force-for-plugin: true. That flag is what makes it apply automatically on install. It sets keep-coding-instructions: true, so every one of Claude Code's built-in engineering instructions stays intact — scoping, verification, comment style, all of it. The plugin adds terseness to how Claude talks; it changes nothing about how Claude codes.

justsaydone/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   ├── plugin.json          # manifest
│   └── marketplace.json     # the repo is its own marketplace
├── output-styles/
│   └── justsaydone.md       # the mode itself
└── benchmark/
    ├── run.sh               # A/B session runner
    └── report.py            # scorer + behavior assertions

Turn it off

/plugin

Disable justsaydone, then /clear. Chatty Claude returns.

License

MIT © Raiyan Yahya