ask

A command-line tool for asking natural-language questions about a code repository and receiving an answer backed by repository evidence. It can also return the answer in structured JSON for automated tools.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating authentication, design decisions, contributors, and other repository questions from a terminal or an automated agent.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually search files, history, and pull requests to understand how the code works or why a decision was made.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/avos-lab/git-aware-coding-agent/ask
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Avos-Lab/git-aware-coding-agent
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 687 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00687
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00344
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00137
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00069

Measured yesterday against content hash 6b067057ef04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

docs/user/commands/ask.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

avos ask

Ask a natural-language question about the repository and get an evidence-backed answer.

Usage

avos ask <question>
avos --json ask <question>

Options

Option Description
question Natural language question about the repository (required)

Global Options

Option Description
--json Emit machine-readable JSON output (for AI agents/automation)

Examples

avos ask "How does authentication work?"
avos ask "What was the rationale for the retry scheduler?"
avos ask "Who worked on the payment module?"

# JSON mode for AI agents
avos --json ask "How does authentication work?"

JSON Output Mode

When --json is passed, output is strict JSON conforming to the avos.ask.v1 schema:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "format": "avos.ask.v1",
    "raw_text": "...",
    "answer": { "text": "..." },
    "evidence": {
      "is_none": false,
      "items": [
        { "line_raw": "...", "kind": "PR", "id": "#123", "title": "...", "author": "...", "date_label": "Mar 2026" }
      ],
      "unparsed_lines": []
    },
    "parse_warnings": []
  },
  "error": null
}

On failure, the envelope contains "success": false with an error object:

{
  "success": false,
  "data": null,
  "error": {
    "code": "CONFIG_NOT_INITIALIZED",
    "message": "...",
    "hint": "Run 'avos connect org/repo' first.",
    "retryable": false
  }
}

JSON mode requires the reply model configuration (see below).

Reply Output (Optional)

To get clean, decorated terminal output (and enable JSON mode), set these environment variables (e.g. in .env):

Variable Description
REPLY_MODEL Model identifier (e.g. Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct)
REPLY_MODEL_URL API endpoint (OpenAI-compatible chat completions)
REPLY_MODEL_API_KEY API key for the reply model

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 94 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 6b067057ef04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask is a command published in the GitHub repository Avos-Lab/git-aware-coding-agent (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 687 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.