gemini-when-to-use

gemini-when-to-use is a skill for Claude Code from azmym/gemini-plugin. It costs 44 tokens per session (952 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision guide for choosing when to ask Google's Gemini AI for help and which Gemini capability to use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before other Gemini add-ons when you are unsure whether to consult Gemini, need to choose between capabilities, or want extra care with facts, versions, security flaws, or research claims.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unnecessary calls, wasted cost, and unsupported answers when the main coding agent can handle the task itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the gemini-plugin plugin — 9 skills, 6 commands, 5 agents, 7 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it before other Gemini add-ons when you are unsure whether to consult Gemini, need to choose between capabilities, or want extra care with facts, versions, security flaws, or research claims.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use
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.

Any agent
npx skills add azmym/gemini-plugin --skill gemini-when-to-use
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/azmym/gemini-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gemini-plugin, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 6 commands, 5 agents, 7 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 gemini-when-to-use

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for gemini-when-to-use

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/azmym/gemini-plugin/gemini-when-to-use.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 952 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00044 $0.00952
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00476
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00190
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00095

Measured 8d ago against content hash 46575f3b910e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gemini-when-to-use 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 8d 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.

skills/gemini-when-to-use/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Gemini When To Use

This is the master routing skill for the Gemini plugin. Before invoking any other gemini-* skill, consult this guide to decide whether a Gemini consult is warranted and which capability to reach for.

When to invoke this skill

  • You are uncertain whether the task justifies a Gemini call at all.
  • The task touches multiple Gemini capabilities and you need to pick the right one.
  • You want to avoid hallucination on a fact, version number, CVE, or post-training claim.
  • A user asks "use Gemini" without specifying which capability.

Cost discipline rules

  1. Do not call Gemini for tasks Claude can handle confidently. Simple string manipulation, well-known algorithms, boilerplate generation, and in-context refactors do not need a second opinion.
  2. One Gemini call per sub-task. Do not fan out multiple parallel Gemini calls unless each covers a distinct, independent concern.
  3. Prefer cheaper tools first. Use gemini_generate (chat/reason) before reaching for gemini_search_grounded or deep research unless freshness is required.
  4. File analysis is expensive. Upload files to Gemini only when the file is genuinely too large for Claude's context or is a non-text format (PDF, image, audio, video).

Anti-hallucination triggers

Invoke a Gemini skill whenever the response would otherwise rely on:

  • A library version, API endpoint, or config key that may have changed since training cutoff.
  • A CVE, security advisory, or patch status.
  • A claim about a living document (spec, RFC, standard) that may have been updated.
  • An assertion about the current state of a third-party service or cloud provider.

The five subagent roles (agents/ directory)

These are pre-built agent configurations for common Gemini workflows. Prefer them over raw MCP calls for structured tasks:

Subagent File Best for
Researcher agents/gemini-researcher.md Deep research synthesis, primary sources with citations
Summarizer agents/gemini-summarizer.md Condensing long documents, transcripts, or codebases
Validator agents/gemini-validator.md Fact-checking claims, verifying logic, sanity-checking before commit
Challenger agents/gemini-challenger.md Devil's advocate critique, stress-testing designs or decisions
Reviewer agents/gemini-reviewer.md Generalist diff/PR review (security, threading, version drift, docs, dead code); manual, advisory via the gemini-consult rule

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 8d ago First seen · 71 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 46575f3b910e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gemini-when-to-use is a skill published in the GitHub repository azmym/gemini-plugin (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 952 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. 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.