A skill-only plugin that tells Claude to send a short acknowledgement to the Telegram user within ~1 second before the first tool call runs. No MCP server, no commands — just a single behavior skill that gets audited every time a Telegram message comes in.
Delivery model: every message is a new
reply— ack, progress, and final answer alike. The skill never usesedit_message. This keeps the rules dead simple and guarantees a push notification at every step. The trade-off (accepted on purpose) is that the user's phone buzzes for each message instead of one message quietly updating in place.
Telegram users read from their phones. A 5-second delay with no sign of life feels like the bot is ghosting. An instant acknowledgement ("hang on, checking...") before the work starts reassures the user that their message landed and Claude is working, even though the final answer only shows up 30 seconds later. The ack mirrors the language the user writes in — casual and in their register.
Before composing a response to any Telegram message, the AI answers 4 tool-counting questions (not judging "is this heavy or not"):
- Will there be a tool call other than
replybefore the final answer? - Will it
Reada file? - Will it run a Bash/shell command (including
git,ls,grep)? - Will it dispatch an Agent / background process / Monitor?
Even a single "yes" → an ack MUST be sent BEFORE the first tool runs. All "no" (a pure-text response with no tools) → no ack needed, answer directly.
This check is deliberately mechanical, not judgement-based — the old version ("non-trivial work", "more than a few seconds") proved to drift in practice: the AI would estimate "only 3 seconds" when it was actually 12, or forget to ack while in flow.
- Instant ack — a sign of life within ~1 second of the message arriving.
- Continuous progress — for tasks > 15 seconds, narrate the transitions between stages. Going silent after the ack is almost as bad as not acking at all.
The full skill lives in skills/immediate-reply/SKILL.md. That's the source of truth — it has the flow diagram, example ack phrasing per situation (research/file read/thinking/writing), the rule to mirror the user's language, and an anti-pattern list.
There are no edit strategies to choose between anymore. The flow is always the same:
- Ack — a new
replysent before the first tool runs. - Progress (tasks > 15s) — a new
replyat each real stage transition. - Final answer — a new
reply.
No edit_message, no message-id juggling, no 15-second threshold to decide
edit-vs-new. Every message buzzes the phone, which is exactly the point: the
user always sees a sign of life.
- Every message is a new
reply. Neveredit_message. - One ack per user message. If the user sends 3 messages within 5 seconds, ack the last one — don't send 3 acks.
- Skip the ack only for pure-text responses with no tools. The "all no" path of the pre-flight check — greetings, a quick fact from memory — answer directly. The moment there's a single Read/Bash/other tool, an ack is mandatory.
- Progress is for stage transitions, not a heartbeat. Since every message buzzes, don't send filler pings — make each update carry new information.
This plugin only makes sense if a Telegram channel is active. Install it alongside:
telegram— required. Without a Telegram channel, this skill will never get triggered.inline-buttons— a nice complement. When you eventually need to ask the user for confirmation, render the options as inline keyboard buttons so the user can answer with a single tap.
Marketplace setup is covered in the root README. Once the mirza-marketplace marketplace is added, install with:
/plugin install immediate-reply@mirza-marketplace
/reload-plugins
The skill loads automatically — no extra configuration.
- Mirza — @mirzaakhena