Add a communication-style setting (plain-English vs developer-speak) at setup and per-project

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

I'm a designer, not a developer, and I use Claude Code every day across a handful of projects. As Claude Code gets more accessible and more non-developers pick it up, the model's default communication style is starting to feel mismatched with the audience.

A small example from today: I asked Claude to pull from GitHub. There was a merge conflict on a settings file. Claude's explanation came back with phrases like "cosmetic lockfile drift," "optional dependencies," "Sharp, Rollup," and "npm rewrote the lockfile." None of that means anything to me. I just wanted to know what happened and what my options were.

When I pushed back, Claude immediately rewrote the same explanation in plain English and it was perfectly clear. So the model can do it — it just doesn't default to it.

Right now I have to re-teach Claude my communication preferences in every new session, and the only reason it sticks at all is because I asked it to write the preference into its own memory file. That shouldn't be on me to figure out.

Proposed Solution

Ask the user up front, and make it a real setting — not something the user has to discover by trial and error.

• At first-time setup: Ask "Who's using this — a developer, a designer, a writer, someone else? How technical should I get?" Save the answer and use it as the default communication style going forward.
• Per-project override: Same question available when opening a new project, because the right register for a codebase I'm maintaining is different from a documentation site I'm designing.

Specifically, the "non-developer" mode should:

• Default to plain-language explanations, not developer jargon. Let the user ask for the technical version if they want it.
• Frame choices as outcomes ("throw away my change and get the latest"), not commands (git checkout -- && git pull).
• If a technical term is unavoidable, define it in the same sentence.

Claude Code is a genuinely useful tool for people like me who work on web things without being engineers. It'd be even better if the default tone met us where we are.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Critical - Blocking my work

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_