  Time-dependent drives play a crucial role in quantum computing efforts with
circuit quantum electrodynamics. They enable single-qubit control, entangling
logical operations, as well as qubit readout. However, their presence can lead
to deleterious effects such as large ac-Stark shifts and unwanted qubit
transitions ultimately reflected into reduced control or readout fidelities.
Qubit cloaking was introduced in Lled\'o, Dassonneville, et al. [C. Lled\'o, R.
Dassonneville, A. Moulinas et al., Nat. Commun. \textbf{14}, 6313 (2023)] to
temporarily decouple the qubit from the coherent photon population of a driven
cavity, allowing for the application of arbitrary displacements to the cavity
field while avoiding the deleterious effects on the qubit. For qubit readout,
cloaking permits to prearm the cavity with an, in principle, arbitrarily large
number of photons, in anticipation to the qubit-state-dependent evolution of
the cavity field, allowing for improved readout strategies. Here we take a
closer look at two of them. First, arm-and-release readout, introduced together
with qubit cloaking, where after arming the cavity the cloaking mechanism is
released and the cavity field evolves under the application of a constant drive
amplitude. Second, an arm-and-longitudinal readout scheme, where the cavity
drive amplitude is slowly modulated after the release. We show that the two
schemes complement each other, offering an improvement over the standard
dispersive readout for any values of the dispersive interaction and cavity
decay rate, as well as any target measurement integration time. Our results
provide a recommendation for improving qubit readout without changes to the
standard circuit QED architecture.
