ask-matt

ask-matt is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from baleen37/bstack. It costs 22 tokens per session (2,730 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ask-matt, MIT.

A skill that helps choose the right engineering workflow from the skills available in a repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to decide which workflow fits a task and to move between planning, prototyping, documentation, and implementation steps.
Why use it?
It provides a route through activities such as shaping an idea, prototyping, documenting decisions, and shipping work, so you do not have to remember every available skill.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the mattpocock-skills plugin — 26 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to decide which workflow fits a task and to move between planning, prototyping, documentation, and implementation steps.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt
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 baleen37/bstack --skill ask-matt
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/baleen37/bstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mattpocock-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 skills.

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-matt

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt/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 ask-matt

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/baleen37/bstack/ask-matt.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,730 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 100% 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 5.1 $0.00022 $0.02730
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.01365
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00546
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00273

Measured 7d ago against content hash b25d86fb36b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-matt 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 7d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to ask-matt — 0 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.

plugins/mattpocock-skills/skills/ask-matt/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ask Matt

You don't remember every skill, so ask.

A flow is a path through the skills. Most paths run along one main flow, and two on-ramps merge onto it. Everything else is standalone, or a vocabulary layer that runs underneath.

The main flow: idea → ship

The route most work travels. You have an idea and want it built.

  1. /grill-with-docs sharpens the idea by interview. Start here whenever you are working in a working directory: it's stateful, retaining what it learns in CONTEXT.md and ADRs. (No working directory? Use /grill-me instead, covered under Standalone. Both run the same /grilling primitive; grill-with-docs is the one that leaves a paper trail, which makes it the better of the two whenever a repo is there to leave it in.)

  2. Branch: can you settle every question in conversation? If a question needs a runnable answer (state, business logic, a UI you have to see), detour through a prototype, bridged by /handoff in both directions (a prototype lives in its own directory, which is exactly what /handoff is for; see Phase boundaries):

    • /handoff out, then open a fresh session against that file,
    • /prototype to answer the question with throwaway code,
    • /handoff back what you learned, and reference it from the original idea thread.
  3. Branch: is this a multi-session build?

    • Yes/to-spec (turn the thread into a spec), then /to-tickets to split it into tracer-bullet tickets, each declaring its blocking edges. On a local tracker that's one file per ticket under .scratch/<feature>/issues/, worked blockers-first by hand; on a real tracker the edges become native blocking links, so any ticket whose blockers are done can be grabbed: kick off /implement per ticket, /clearing context between each one. Each ticket is self-contained, so the last one's context is disposable.
    • No/implement right here, in the same context window.

    Either way, /implement builds each issue by driving /tdd internally (one red-green slice at a time), then closes out by running /code-review, a two-axis review (Standards + Spec) of the diff, before committing. Reach for /tdd on its own when you just want to build a concrete behaviour test-first without a full spec, and /code-review on its own whenever you want to review a branch or PR against a fixed point.

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 7d ago First seen · 91 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A b25d86fb36b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-matt is a skill published in the GitHub repository baleen37/bstack (4 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 2,730 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to ask-matt, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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