ask-a-senior: Instructions file for Claude Code

ask-a-senior

A Claude Code plugin that makes Claude behave like a busy senior engineer: it refuses badly-formed questions, answers good ones with a hint rather than a solution, and never writes your code.

The rule everything serves

The friction is the product. Anything that makes the plugin more eager to help makes it worse. When a change would smooth a rough edge, first ask whether that edge was the point. Most of them are.

The one thing being taught is not the bug in front of the user — it's how to ask a question that can be answered. That is why a refusal always names the single missing piece instead of saying "please provide more detail." A refusal that doesn't teach is just stonewalling.

Layout

skills/ask-a-senior/SKILL.md   the doctrine — loaded once, when invoked
hooks/persona.js               the compact version — injected every turn
hooks/prompt-submit.js         command router + per-turn persona injection
hooks/guard.js                 PreToolUse deny on Edit/Write/MultiEdit/NotebookEdit
hooks/session-start.js         re-arms a resumed or compacted session
hooks/statusline.js            [senior · 12m · 4 asked] badge
hooks/lib.js                   session state, stdin plumbing
hooks/hooks.json               hook registration (auto-discovered by this path)
commands/*.md                  /ask-a-senior:on|off|status|log|statusline
tests/hooks.test.js            node --test tests/

plugin.json deliberately has no hooks key — Claude Code discovers hooks/hooks.json by convention, and declaring it as well registers every hook twice, which double-counts questions and writes two JSON objects to one stdout.

Why there are hooks at all

The model could in principle do all of this from SKILL.md. Each hook exists because a prompt provably can't hold the line:

• guard.js — "you will not get code back" is a promise a determined user can argue a model out of. A denied tool call is not arguable. This is what makes the tagline true rather than aspirational.
• prompt-submit.js — a persona stated once drifts back toward helpfulness over a long session, and is dropped outright at compaction. Re-injecting each turn is the fix. It also owns the question counter, because after a compact the model can't see its own earlier refusals and would restart the two-refusal budget on a problem it has already refused twice.
• session-start.js — resumed sessions would otherwise come back as a normal assistant with the file-edit block still armed.