Design note

Reply gears

The key you press to send is already a decision about how much you want back. This note is the design for making that decision deliberate: three gears, no dropdown, nothing to remember.

The problem

Every message you send has an implicit length request in it, and it is usually wrong. You ask "what broke?" while standing up and get nine paragraphs. You ask for a fix in three words and get a plan, an apology and two alternatives you did not want. Then you type "shorter" — which costs a round trip and teaches the agent nothing about the next message.

Settings do not fix this either. A "verbosity" slider is global and you are not: the same person wants one line at 9:00 and a full design at 22:00. The gear has to be per message, and it has to cost one keystroke.

Why keys, not a menu

A dropdown costs a click, a decision and a glance — three things you will stop paying after the second message. The send key already has a modifier held or not held, so the decision can ride along for free. It also fails in the right direction: if you forget the gear, Enter gives you the normal, complete answer.

The three gears

• Enter — normal. The answer you would give a colleague: the thing, the reason, and what to do next. This stays the default because most messages actually want this.
• Shift+Enter — brief. Conclusion and nothing else: one or two sentences, no options, no closing question. For checking a fact while doing something else.
• Ctrl+Enter — as a task. Do not answer, execute: plan the steps, do them, report what changed, list the files. For anything that ends in files existing rather than words being read.

A fourth gear was tried and cut: a wheel-based "level 1–5". It reads well in a spec and is unusable while typing, because you cannot see the level without looking away from the box.

Getting it today

No agent I know of ships this, but two of the three gears are reachable: the send key is mappable on the keyboard side, and the style instruction is a prefix you can attach to the message. AutoHotkey v2 on Windows, checking that the foreground window is the agent's:

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
; Shift+Enter -> prefix the message with the brief gear, then send
#HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe youragent.exe")
+Enter:: {
    Send "Reply in at most two sentences. Conclusion only, no options.`n"
    Send "{Enter}"
}
^Enter:: {
    Send "Treat this as a task: plan, execute, then list every file you created or changed.`n"
    Send "{Enter}"
}
#HotIf

On macOS the same idea goes in Karabiner-Elements, or in the app's own shortcut settings if it has them. Two limits, stated plainly: the prefix adds a line to your message that the agent will quote back at you, and an agent that treats Shift+Enter as a newline never sees the keystroke at all — check that first, because most of them do.

What is not built

• A per-agent preset, so the gear maps to each client's own "concise" flag instead of a pasted prefix.
• A visible gear indicator, so you can see which one is armed. The design is a single character in the input box's margin; it is not implemented, and until it is, the prefix in your own message is the indicator.
• Anything that persists. The gear is per message by design, and there is no state to sync.

If you try the script and the brief gear comes back as three sentences and a follow-up question, that is useful: send the transcript to the contact address and it goes into the next version of the prefix.