What is cli-help-improve?

A guide for thoroughly reviewing the help shown by one or more dhcli commands. It covers command behavior, missing help sections, output descriptions, and consistency between generated help, the agent manifest, and CLI documentation.

Use it when command help is incomplete, outdated, or newly added. It guides a full review of the handler, options, errors, output, examples, and all help surfaces.

It prevents users and automated agents from relying on incomplete or conflicting command instructions. It also keeps the command’s documented output and behavior tied to the implementation.

cli-help-improve — Skill by deephaven

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-improve

Any agent

npx skills add deephaven/deephaven-mcp --skill cli-help-improve

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deephaven/deephaven-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 793 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00072	$0.00793
Opus 5	$0.00036	$0.00396
Sonnet 5	$0.00014	$0.00159
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00079

Measured 2d ago against content hash 14cc6b02448b, 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-improve 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-improve/SKILL.md · 33 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 33 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

When to use this vs. cli-help-accuracy: use cli-help-improve for a full review (accuracy + missing sections + output single-sourcing + reconciling all three surfaces). Use cli-help-accuracy for surgical correctness-only fixes when the help structure is already complete.

Before doing anything

Load ref-cli-help-standards — it is the contract this skill enforces. Identify the target: a single command module under cli/_commands/, or the whole CLI. For each command, the surfaced help (the command's HelpSpec, every click.option(help=...), group docstrings) is in scope; internal docstrings are not (those are pydocs-improve's job).

Steps

For each command in scope:

Read the handler. Determine what the command actually does, every positional argument and option, every CliError(code=...) it raises (directly or via a shared helper like acquire_daemon), the exit codes it can return, and the exact shape of what it prints (format_output(...) payload).
Check section coverage against ref-cli-help-standards Help-content contract. Add any missing section via the command's HelpSpec: Summary, Description (with side effects), Arguments, Output, Examples (one human + one agent), See also, Exit codes, Error codes. Drop a section only when genuinely not applicable (no positional args → no Arguments; pure discovery command → no Error codes).
Single-source the output (Output is single-source). Define one OutputSpec constant; pass it as the spec's output= field (output_spec derives from it). Each OutputField(name, type, help) must name a real key in the printed payload. Free-form output uses mode="text" with empty fields.
Apply cli-help-accuracy to the command — every documented flag, argument, error code, exit code, and output field must match the code.
Strip RST (Plain text, not reStructuredText) from every surfaced string: no double-backtick literals, no :func:/:class: roles. Use single quotes for inline literals.
Reconcile the third surface. Update the command's entry in docs/CLI.md so flags, arguments, exit codes, error codes, and output fields agree. docs/CLI.md has no automated check — verify by hand (apply docs-accuracy for that file).
Verify per the standard's Verify section: render --help, inspect the agents node (params + error codes + output, no double-backtick literals or \b), and run the contract tests.

Read the full file on GitHub · 33 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.

2d ago First seen · 33 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 14cc6b02448b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cli-help-improve is a skill published in the GitHub repository deephaven/deephaven-mcp (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 793 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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