Incisive Exegesis
A Claude Code output style for clearer, sharper responses — verdict-first, crisp, and cleanly structured.
Exegesis — a deep, critical unpacking of meaning. The name is the promise: a reply that gets straight to the point and fully explains it, with nothing wasted.
What you get
- Verdict first — the answer in sentence one, in bold. No "Great question, let me help you with that."
- Plain, declarative, economical — the simplest exact word, no hedging, no filler. Written for a smart reader, not a thesaurus.
- Structure that scales — trivia stays a sentence; a real comparison becomes a table; a procedure becomes numbered steps.
- Choices via the picker — when you must choose, it pops a selection prompt instead of burying options in prose.
- A distilled closing takeaway — a rule of thumb that compresses the whole answer.
Under the hood: a calibrated voice-and-tone block, 13 tricky-moment registers (disagreeing, hard truths, owning a mistake, declining…), and 24 scenario playbooks (code review, debugging, planning, API design…).
It reshapes the prose register only. With keep-coding-instructions: true, Claude Code's engineering behavior, tool use, and your project instructions are preserved — it changes how answers read, not whether the work gets done.
Before / after
Same prompt, default Claude Code vs incisive-exegesis. Prompt: "Should I store dates in my database as UTC or local time?"
| Before — default | After — Incisive Exegesis |
|---|
|
Great question! Storing dates correctly is an important decision and something a lot of developers think carefully about. There are a few different approaches, and the right one depends on your use case.
On one hand, UTC gives you a consistent reference point. On the other hand, some people prefer local time because it feels more intuitive. Both come with tradeoffs worth weighing.
Ultimately, you'll want to consider where your users are, whether you compare across time zones, and how you display the data. I'd be happy to go deeper if it helps!
|
Store UTC. Convert to local time only at the display layer, in the viewer's time zone.
| Property | UTC | Local |
|---|
| Comparable across regions | yes | no | | Survives a server move | yes | no | | Ambiguous around DST | no | yes |
Keep the zone separately only to reconstruct the user's wall-clock intent (e.g. a 9 a.m. alarm).
Rule of thumb: store the instant; render the time zone.
|
It also scales down — a trivial question gets one tight answer, no headers or tables.
Requirements
- Claude Code (CLI, desktop, or IDE extension). The output style applies on the next
/clear or new session.
Installation
In any Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add zivkong/incisive-exegesis
/plugin install incisive-exegesis@zivkong
/reload-plugins
Then turn it on:
- Output style —
/config → Output Style → incisive-exegesis:Incisive Exegesis, then /clear to apply.
- Theme —
/theme → Incisive Exegesis (Dark) or (Light).
Scope it per project via settings.json
/config and /theme save your choice globally. To scope it to one repo instead, copy the exact outputStyle (and theme) values Claude Code wrote into ~/.claude/settings.json after you selected them, into that repo's .claude/settings.json. Plugin component IDs are namespaced, so copy them verbatim rather than typing them by hand. The output style applies on the next /clear.
Note: Claude Code labels every plugin component with the plugin namespace, so the style appears as incisive-exegesis:Incisive Exegesis. Plugin themes are an experimental Claude Code feature and may not appear in /theme on every version yet — the output style is unaffected.
Uninstall
/plugin uninstall incisive-exegesis@zivkong
/plugin marketplace remove zivkong
/reload-plugins
That removes the plugin, its cache, and its components. Two things uninstall cannot touch — clear them yourself for a clean slate:
- The style/theme selection. Uninstalling leaves your
outputStyle / theme choices in settings.json, so they'll dangle. Reset them: /config → Output Style → Default, and /theme → pick another — or delete the outputStyle and theme keys from ~/.claude/settings.json (and settings.local.json).
- A legacy manual copy. Older versions were installed by hand. If you ever did that, delete
~/.claude/output-styles/incisive-exegesis.md — otherwise it lingers as a second, un-namespaced Incisive Exegesis entry alongside the plugin's incisive-exegesis:Incisive Exegesis.
