The Official Claude Code Telegram Plugin Has 3 Tools. Here's What's Missing — and How We Fixed It.

You can't build approval workflows

Without inline keyboards, every approval is a text conversation:

Claude: "Should I deploy v0.1.1?"
You: "yes"
Claude: [deploys]

With inline keyboards:

Claude: [message with Deploy / Cancel buttons]
You: [taps Deploy]
Claude: [deploys immediately]

The button version is faster, unambiguous, and works when you're on your phone with one hand.

You can't schedule anything

Claude Code is reactive — it responds when you message it. But a real AI assistant should be proactive:

• Morning brief at 9 AM without you asking
• Flight status checks every 30 minutes before departure
• CI pipeline monitoring after a deploy
• Weekly digest of industry news

The official plugin has no scheduler. Every interaction requires you to initiate.

You can't share files

Send Claude a PDF on Telegram? It sees (document) as text. The file is ignored. Send a voice message? Same thing — the audio is dropped. For a tool that's supposed to be your AI co-founder, not being able to read documents you send is a fundamental gap.

You can't format responses

Claude's replies arrive as plain text. No bold headers, no code blocks, no structured formatting. A morning brief that could look like this:

<b>Morning Brief — March 22</b>

▸ GitIntel: v0.1.0 live, 8 downloads
▸ CI: all green
▸ <code>npm audit</code>: 0 vulnerabilities

Instead looks like this:

Morning Brief — March 22

▸ GitIntel: v0.1.0 live, 8 downloads
▸ CI: all green
▸ npm audit: 0 vulnerabilities

Small difference visually. Big difference in scanability when you're reading on a phone.

The Scheduler

The most impactful addition. A cron-based task scheduler that runs inside the plugin process itself. Why inside? Because running a separate bot process alongside the official plugin causes a 409 Conflict error — Telegram only allows one process to poll a bot token at a time.

{
  "tasks": [
    {
      "id": "morning_brief",
      "cron": "57 8 * * *",
      "prompt": "Generate the morning brief.",
      "chat_id": "123456789",
      "recurring": true
    }
  ],
  "timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
  "quiet_hours": { "start": 1, "end": 7 }
}

When a task is due, the scheduler sends an MCP notification to Claude. Claude processes it like any inbound message and replies via Telegram. Features beyond basic cron:

• Quiet hours— non-urgent tasks don't fire between 1-7 AM
• Task expiry— “check flight status until 8 PM, then stop”
• Max runs— “check CI 30 times, then stop”
• Tags — filter tasks by category
• Urgent flag — bypass quiet hours for critical alerts
• Human delays — schedule_delay("2h") instead of computing cron

Inline Keyboards

Two new tools: send_keyboard and answer_callback. When the user taps a button, the callback data arrives as a channel notification with callback_query: true in the metadata. Claude receives it and can take action — deploy, approve, cancel.

Security note: we track received callback IDs in memory and only allow answer_callback for queries the plugin actually received. An attacker can't craft a fake callback_query_id.

Document and Voice Handling

Documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, any file) and voice messages are now downloaded to an inbox directory when received. Filenames from Telegram are sanitized (path separators and .. stripped) to prevent directory traversal. The inbox directory is created with 0o700 permissions.

Message Formatting

The reply and edit_message tools now accept an optional parse_mode parameter: "MarkdownV2" or "HTML". This lets Claude send formatted messages with bold text, code blocks, links, and structured layouts.