interrogate

interrogate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bguthrie/prospero. It costs 17 tokens per session (1,861 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided questioning process for turning a topic or argument into an outline for a blog post. It uses questions to uncover the strongest opposing view.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to develop a new post outline, clarify the main argument, and identify a serious counterargument.
Why use it?
It helps test whether an idea is worth writing about and exposes weak reasoning before drafting begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the prospero plugin — 6 skills, 5 commands 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 skills/bguthrie/prospero/interrogate
Any agent
npx skills add bguthrie/prospero --skill interrogate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bguthrie/prospero

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install prospero, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 5 commands.

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 interrogate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bguthrie/prospero/interrogate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bguthrie/prospero/interrogate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bguthrie/prospero/interrogate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bguthrie/prospero/interrogate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,861 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 $0.00017 $0.01861
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00931
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00372
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00186

Measured 4d ago against content hash 87c1bc859b57, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interrogate 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.

skills/interrogate/SKILL.md · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interrogate

Through Socratic questioning, transform a raw topic into a dialectical outline that names its own best counterargument. Produces drafts/<slug>/outline.md.

When to use

  • The user has a topic, idea, or argument and wants to start a new post.
  • The user wants to test whether an idea is worth writing about before committing to a draft.

Do NOT use for:

  • Editing or restructuring an existing draft → use /revise.
  • Reviewing an outline that already exists → use /critique.

Preconditions

You MUST complete these checks before asking any questions. Do not skip ahead.

Run these as a silent preflight. Do not narrate them to the user unless a check fails; a passing preflight should be invisible.

1. .prospero/config.toml must exist

If .prospero/config.toml does NOT exist in the current working directory, invoke the prospero:init skill and follow it to completion. When init returns, resume at step 2 below. Do not proceed to questioning with an unconfigured project.

2. .prospero/voice.md and .prospero/audience.md must be filled in

For each of .prospero/voice.md and .prospero/audience.md, compute byte-for-byte equality against the plugin's corresponding template at <plugin-root>/templates/voice.md and <plugin-root>/templates/audience.md. Use the plugin-root resolution procedure defined in the init skill's "Resolving the plugin's templates directory" section. Do not abbreviate its failure handling: zero matches → ask the user; multiple matches → ask the user; match found but voice.md or audience.md missing → halt with the resolved path.

  • If either user file is Missing → halt with: ".prospero/<file> is missing. Run /init to restore it, then fill it in before /interrogate."
  • If either user file is byte-for-byte equal to its template → halt with: ".prospero/<file> is the unmodified scaffold. Fill it in before running /interrogate; this is the one thing Prospero cannot write for you."
  • Otherwise → the file is user content. Proceed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 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 · 127 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 87c1bc859b57

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interrogate is a skill published in the GitHub repository bguthrie/prospero (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,861 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories