ask

ask is a command for coding agents from MadaraUchiha-314/the-loop. It costs 0 tokens per session (605 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that lets an agent ask a human a question on a work item, such as a GitHub issue or pull request.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when an agent needs a decision or missing information, either by passing the question directly or reading it from a file or standard input.
Why use it?
It records that the agent is waiting for an answer and makes that state visible to operators. The question is posted with a marker that prevents the agent from responding to its own message.

Command

Part of the the-loop plugin — 2 skills, 37 commands, 2 hooks shipped together

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/madarauchiha-314/the-loop/ask
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MadaraUchiha-314/the-loop

Or install the-loop, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 37 commands, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ask

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/madarauchiha-314/the-loop/ask.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/madarauchiha-314/the-loop/ask)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/madarauchiha-314/the-loop/ask"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/madarauchiha-314/the-loop/ask.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
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 605 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 $0.00605
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00302
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00121
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00060

Measured 4d ago against content hash dc540a67c534, 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 4d ago.

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/cli/commands/ask.md · 53 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ask

Ask a human a question on the work item — the way a spawned agent escalates.

the-loop ask --work-item github:OWNER/REPO#N --question "Which auth mode?"
the-loop ask --work-item github:OWNER/REPO#N --question-file question.md
some-tool | the-loop ask --work-item github:OWNER/REPO#N --question-file -

What it does

One verb, three effects — in this order:

  1. Posts the question as a comment on the work item through your own gh (the issues endpoint serves PR conversations too), with the visible attribution line and the loop-prevention marker appended centrally. That stamping is the point (issue-208): before this verb, every agent was trusted to remember the marker on every question, and one lapse turned its own comment into an event that resumed its own session.
  2. Records the wait as a session.awaiting_input event — question text, the comment's URL, who asked. This is what makes the waiting session observable: GET /api/v1/attention reports the work item as awaiting-input, and the dashboard's question card lights up.
  3. Leaves the answering to the reply route: an operator answers either on the ticket (the poller forwards it, as ever) or straight into the session's pane via POST /api/v1/sessions/reply, which emits the session.reply_sent that closes the wait.

If gh fails, the exit code is 1 and the failure is printed — but the wait is still recorded (comment_posted: false, level warning): the agent is waiting whether or not GitHub was reachable, and the reply route can still carry the answer.

Flags

Flag Default Meaning
--work-item required The ref the question goes to.
--question The question text (markdown).
--question-file Read the question from a file; - reads stdin. Exactly one of the two.

Notes

  • Runs in-process, not through the control-plane service — deliberately, and unlike the other session verbs: this is the escalation path, the one verb that must keep working when no service is running (or in a cloud session that has no daemon at all).
  • An empty question or malformed ref exits 2 and posts/records nothing.
  • The stamp is idempotent: a question that already carries the marker is not double-stamped.

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 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. 4d ago First seen · 53 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A dc540a67c534

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask is a command published in the GitHub repository MadaraUchiha-314/the-loop (4 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 605 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.