244 stars in under a day, for a plugin that changes nothing about what Claude does — only how it sounds.
On August 10, 2026, developer gvzdv published claudish-to-english, a small Claude Code plugin that appends a plain-English rewrite underneath Claude's replies — generated locally by an Ollama model, with the original response left untouched. The repo, MIT-licensed, crossed 244 GitHub stars within roughly 24 hours of going public, the kind of overnight traction that reliably lands a project on r/ClaudeAI.
explainx.ai's read: this is a narrow, well-scoped fix for a real annoyance — Claude's tendency to answer in dense, jargon-heavy "Claudish" — and it's worth understanding both because of what it does and because the name collides with an unrelated, larger project. See Top 25 Claude Plugins for where it fits in the broader ecosystem.
TL;DR — what people are asking
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is it? | A Claude Code plugin that shows a plain-English rewrite of Claude's replies |
| Does it change Claude's actual answer? | No — display-only; transcript and reasoning stay original |
| Where does the rewrite come from? | A local Ollama model (default gemma4:26b-mlx, ~17GB) |
| Does it send data anywhere? | No — everything runs on your machine |
| What if Ollama isn't running? | Fail-open — Claude's original text just shows, no error |
| Can it rewrite files too? | Optional, opt-in .md rewriting scoped to one directory |
| How new is it? | Published Aug 10, 2026 — 244★ in ~24 hours |
What "Claudish" actually means here
Claudish, in this plugin's naming, is the register coding agents tend to default to: confident, compressed, full of terms like "orchestrate the migration idempotently" or "hook into the PostToolUse lifecycle to enforce the invariant." Precise for an engineer already in context — opaque for anyone skimming a PR description, a teammate outside the codebase, or a non-technical stakeholder reading a status update.
claudish-to-english doesn't stop Claude from talking that way. It runs a second pass through a local model that takes Claude's finished reply and produces a simplified version, shown as an additional block rather than a replacement (by default).
Naming collision, worth flagging: a separate, older, and considerably larger project — MadAppGang/claudish (created November 2025, 959★) — uses "Claudish" for something else entirely: Claude Code's native API schema, which that tool translates so Claude Code can route to non-Anthropic models through a local proxy. Same word, two unrelated meanings — one is about jargon, the other about wire format. If you searched for "Claudish" expecting multi-model routing, you want MadAppGang's project, not this one.
How the rewrite actually works
The plugin ships two hooks, both opt-in in scope:
| Hook | Trigger | What it does |
|---|---|---|
MessageDisplay | Every assistant reply | Buffers streamed chunks, waits for the final one, sends it to Ollama, appends the plain-English version |
PostToolUse | File write/edit inside a set directory | Optionally rewrites .md files to plain English — off unless CLAUDISH_MD_DIR is set |
The MessageDisplay hook reads the original user question purely for context — the README is explicit that it never answers the question itself or repeats it back, only rewrites what Claude already said. That constraint matters: a rewrite step that started reasoning on its own would be a very different, much riskier feature than a cosmetic one.
Fail-open is the load-bearing design choice. If Ollama isn't running, the model hasn't been pulled, or the request times out, Claude's original response displays exactly as it would without the plugin installed — no blocked session, no error surfaced to the user. For a plugin sitting on every message's display path, that's the right default; a fail-closed version would turn a cosmetic feature into an availability dependency.
Install — copy-paste sequence
Inside Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add gvzdv/claudish-to-english
/plugin install claudish-to-english@gvzdv-plugins
Requirements:
- Ollama running locally
- A pulled model — default
gemma4:26b-mlx, roughly 17GB jqandcurl— both ship with macOS by default
Configuration
Set these as environment variables in Claude Code's settings.json, not by editing plugin files directly:
{
"env": {
"CLAUDISH_MODEL": "gemma4:26b-mlx",
"CLAUDISH_MODE": "append"
}
}
| Variable | Values | Effect |
|---|---|---|
CLAUDISH_MODEL | any pulled Ollama model tag | Which local model generates the rewrite |
CLAUDISH_MODE | append (default) / replace | Show both versions, or hide the original entirely |
CLAUDISH_MD_DIR | a directory path | Opts in .md file rewriting, scoped to that path only |
append adds a "💬 In plain English" block under Claude's normal reply. replace shows only the simplified version — useful if you're demoing to a non-technical audience and don't want the jargon on screen at all, but it does mean you lose the original phrasing from the visible transcript for that session.
Where it fits — and where it doesn't
| Approach | What it changes | Data leaves machine? |
|---|---|---|
| claudish-to-english | Display rewrite only, via local Ollama | No |
| openai/codex-plugin-cc | Delegates actual review/implementation to Codex | Yes — hits OpenAI |
| MadAppGang/claudish | Reroutes Claude Code's requests to a different model provider | Depends on target model |
| Manual prompting ("explain simpler") | One-off, per-message, not persistent | No |
The distinction that matters: plugins like codex-plugin-cc change what does the work. claudish-to-english changes nothing about the work — it's a presentation layer bolted onto the display path, closer to a browser reader-mode extension than to a multi-model orchestration tool. See AI coding plugins ecosystem for how these categories map across 185+ tools.
Honest limitations
- 17GB model pull for the default
gemma4:26b-mlx— not a lightweight install, and worth checking disk space before running the marketplace command. - Adds latency per message — the
MessageDisplayhook waits for the full response, then makes a separate local inference call before the rewrite appears. - Local model quality varies — a plain-English rewrite is only as good as the small model doing the rewriting; nuance Claude captured in the original answer can flatten out.
- Very new — published August 10, 2026, three open issues at the time of writing, no tagged releases yet. Treat it as early and unstable rather than a mature, widely-battle-tested plugin like the ones in Top 25 Claude Plugins.
- macOS-leaning defaults — the
jq/curlrequirement note specifically calls out that both ship with macOS; Linux and Windows users will need to confirm both are installed separately.
Summary
gvzdv/claudish-to-english is a narrowly-scoped Claude Code plugin that appends a locally-generated, plain-English rewrite of Claude's replies via Ollama — display-only, fail-open, and opt-in for file rewriting. It doesn't touch what Claude decides or how it reasons, only how the answer reads. Don't confuse it with MadAppGang/claudish, an unrelated and larger project that uses the same "Claudish" name for translating Claude Code's API schema to other model providers. If your team gets pinged with "what does this actually mean" on Claude's replies more often than you'd like, it's a low-risk, fully-local plugin worth the 17GB model pull; if you were looking for multi-model routing, look at MadAppGang's project instead.
Related on explainx.ai
- Top 25 Claude Plugins in 2026
- AI coding plugins ecosystem — OpenAI + Anthropic
- OpenAI Codex plugin for Claude Code — setup guide
- What is CLAUDE.md? Persistent memory for Claude Code
- GLM-5.1 — how to run it locally with Ollama
- Agent Plugins — OpenAI's open plugin standard (Aug 6, 2026)
Sources: gvzdv/claudish-to-english · MadAppGang/claudish · r/ClaudeAI discussion thread
Plugin behavior, environment variables, and star counts reflect the GitHub repository as of August 11, 2026. Verify current install steps and model requirements against the README before adding it to a shared team config.