cli-help-accuracy

A review guide for checking that a command-line tool’s help text matches its code. It covers flags, arguments, error codes, exit codes, and output fields.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare command help with the command handler and correct factual mistakes. It is intended for focused fixes when the help structure is already complete.
Why use it?
It prevents users from following instructions that are missing, outdated, or incorrect. It also helps keep the generated help and separately written CLI documentation in sync.

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/deephaven/deephaven-mcp/cli-help-accuracy
Any agent
npx skills add deephaven/deephaven-mcp --skill cli-help-accuracy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deephaven/deephaven-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 724 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 $0.00080 $0.00724
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00362
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00145
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00072

Measured 2d ago against content hash 646e39f6ffaf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cli-help-accuracy 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.

.agents/skills/cli-help-accuracy/SKILL.md · 30 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 30 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

When to use this vs. cli-help-improve: use cli-help-accuracy for surgical correctness-only fixes when the help structure is already complete. Use cli-help-improve for a full review that may add missing sections, single-source the output schema, or reconcile all three surfaces.

Before doing anything

Load ref-cli-help-standards. --help and the agents manifest both render from the command's HelpSpec, so fixing the spec fixes both; docs/CLI.md is authored separately and must be reconciled by hand. Fixing an inaccuracy in the spec without the doc (or vice versa) reintroduces drift, so check and fix both together.

Verify every claim against the handler

For each command in scope, read the handler and confirm:

  • Options and arguments — every documented flag/argument exists with the stated name, type, default, and effect; every actual option has a help=; show_default=True where there is a default. No documented flag is missing from the code, and no code flag is undocumented.
  • Error codes — the error_codes= block lists exactly the error_codes the command can raise. Trace each CliError(code=...) in the handler and in any shared helper it calls (e.g. acquire_daemon raises daemon_startup_timeout / daemon_reuse_refused / daemon_not_running / daemon_registry_corrupt). No phantom codes; no missing ones.
  • Exit codes — the documented numeric codes match reality. Every CliError exits 2 except ErrorCode.TOOL_RETURNED_ERROR, the sole code whose exit_code is 3; the exit code is carried by the ErrorCode, not a CliError parameter (there is no exit_code= argument).
  • Output fields — every OutputField names a real key in the format_output(...) payload, with the correct type; the mode (object/list/text) matches what is printed. The OutputSpec constant is passed once, as the spec's output= field (single source — never two literals that can drift). Each field's help string must accurately describe the value vocabulary the code emits — apply ref-output-serialization-conventions.
  • Examples — each example command is runnable and uses real flags/args; jq filters reference real output keys.
  • Plain text — no double-backtick literals or :func:/:class: markup in any surfaced string.

Read the full file on GitHub · 30 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. 2d ago First seen · 30 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 646e39f6ffaf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cli-help-accuracy is a skill published in the GitHub repository deephaven/deephaven-mcp (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 724 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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