ask-colleague

ask-colleague is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from agentculture/learn-cli. It costs 378 tokens per session (3,506 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ask-colleague, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for asking a separate AI system for a second opinion on a coding task or code review. It is designed to add an independent perspective rather than assume the other system is better.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review a non-trivial committed change or hand a clearly scoped repository task to another AI backend.
Why use it?
A separate reviewer can notice problems the original author overlooked, and read-only review work does not modify the main working tree.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/agentculture/learn-cli/ask-colleague
Any agent
npx skills add agentculture/learn-cli --skill ask-colleague
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/agentculture/learn-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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-colleague

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agentculture/learn-cli/ask-colleague.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/agentculture/learn-cli/ask-colleague)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/agentculture/learn-cli/ask-colleague"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agentculture/learn-cli/ask-colleague.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 378 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,506 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 94% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00378 $0.03506
Opus 5 $0.00189 $0.01753
Sonnet 5 $0.00076 $0.00701
Haiku 4.5 $0.00038 $0.00351

Measured 3d ago against content hash 0c09905eb952, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-colleague 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 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/ask-colleague.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to ask-colleague — 11 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.claude/skills/ask-colleague/SKILL.md · 214 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 214 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ask-colleague — lean on colleague as a different mind

ask-colleague drives the colleague CLI so a Claude agent can hand a scoped task to a different backend (default: a local vLLM Qwen3.6-27B on :8001). Colleague's model is not assumed to be stronger than you — its value is diversity. A second, independent mind catches things the author's mind glides past, which is why review is the headline verb. Treat it the way you'd turn to the colleague at the next desk: a quick, low-ceremony ask, not a heavyweight handoff.

This skill is the operator: a portable wrapper that resolves the CLI and turns each verb into a colleague work, then prints the work item's result summary.

The reflex — when to ask colleague unprompted

Don't wait to be told. The two read-only verbs have zero side effects (throwaway worktree, can't touch your tree), so reaching for them is always safe — make it a habit on tasks that fit:

GO (reach out on your own — default to the read-only verbs):

  • review — the standing reflex. You (or a subagent) just produced a non-trivial committed diff and are about to present it or open a PR. Get a diverse second opinion first. A different mind catches what the author's mind glides past — that's the whole point. A real review on a local model takes tens of seconds to a few minutes (it reads the diff + touched files), so kick it off in the background and keep working rather than blocking on it; fold the findings in when it lands.
  • explore — you need to understand an unfamiliar area whose answer is independent of your current context, and you could be doing something else meanwhile. Fan it out, fold the findings back.
  • A scoped, verifiable subtask where a fresh pass raises your confidence and you can cheaply check the result.

NO-GO (just do it yourself):

  • Work that needs your accumulated context, the user's intent, or cross-cutting design judgment — a context-free second mind will drift, not help.
  • Anything outward-facing or destructive without a user nod: write --apply / write --pr, posting, deleting. The read-only verbs are the unprompted reflex; side-effecting ones are not.
  • Trivial work that's faster to just do (a one-line edit) — the work item + fold-back costs more than the edit.
  • Output you can't verify cheaply — if you can't check it, diversity is just noise.

Read the full file on GitHub · 214 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 3d ago First seen · 214 lines · 378 tokens per session scan A 0c09905eb952

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-colleague is a skill published in the GitHub repository agentculture/learn-cli (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 378 tokens to every session and 3,506 once invoked, about $0.0019 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to ask-colleague, differing in 11 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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