ask-me

A guided interview workflow that asks several rounds of questions about a topic, researches between rounds, and produces an output such as a specification, plan, goal file, or decision record.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a product, plan a project, record a decision, or create a specification through a structured conversation.
Why use it?
It helps turn an unclear idea into documented decisions by gathering context and preferences before creating the final deliverable.

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/billbuchanan-code/claude-code-power-setup/ask-me
Any agent
npx skills add billbuchanan-code/claude-code-power-setup --skill ask-me
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/billbuchanan-code/claude-code-power-setup

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,521 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 $0.00101 $0.01521
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00760
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00304
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00152

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1200493d09fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-me 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 2d 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/ask-me/SKILL.md · 112 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 112 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/ask-me — research-driven interview

Interview the user about: $ARGUMENTS

If no topic was given, ask one open question (plain text, not the tool) about what to cover, then proceed.

Parse the request

Free text in the arguments may override defaults: a round count ("8 rounds", "at least 10"), an output ("output goal.md", "then write the spec"), "quick" (lightweight mode), "no html". Everything else is the topic. Defaults: 5–10 rounds (adaptive, see Stopping), HTML briefings on, deliverable = decision log unless a spec/goal/plan was requested.

Phase 0 — Research first. Never open with questions.

  • Read anything the request names (handoff docs, specs, the codebase, screenshots).
  • For product/greenfield topics, launch parallel background research agents (existing tools, open-source prior art, data sources, best practices) and let them run during early rounds.
  • Check persistent memory and any existing ask-me-notes.md for preferences already on record — never re-ask a settled preference; surface it in the briefing's "decided so far" strip instead.
  • Sketch an interview map: 5–10 themes, one per round, ordered so high-stakes decisions come first (architecture, scope, data) and easy/confirmatory ones last (naming, polish).
  • Create the notes file (see Compaction safety) before round 1.

The round loop

Each round = briefing → questions → log → adapt.

1. Briefing (skip in quick mode)

Rewrite ONE file — <scratchpad>/ask-me-briefing.html — every round; never create per-round files. <title> = "Round N: Theme". Start from references/briefing-template.html. Content: what this round decides, research findings, each option with honest trade-offs, mockups/diagrams when the question is visual, and a running "decided so far" strip.

Open it with the first viewer that applies — decide once in round 1, then reuse that choice:

  1. cmux — if $CMUX_WORKSPACE_ID is set and the CLI exists: /Applications/cmux.app/Contents/Resources/bin/cmux browser open "file://<abs-path>/ask-me-briefing.html" Repeated calls reuse the same pane and reload in place. Never use macOS open for HTML when in cmux — it goes to the default browser instead of the cmux pane.
  2. Artifact tool — if available: publish the briefing as an artifact (loading the artifact-design skill first, as its instructions require). Republishing the same file path updates the same URL every round.
  3. OS default browseropen (macOS), xdg-open (Linux), or start (Windows). Tell the user the tab does not auto-refresh, and open the file again each round.

Read the full file on GitHub · 112 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 2d ago First seen · 112 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A 1200493d09fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository billbuchanan-code/claude-code-power-setup (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 1,521 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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