ref-cli-help-standards

A writing and review standard for the dhcli command-line interface, where users operate software by typing commands. It defines the required help sections, formatting, and consistency between terminal help, an agents manifest, and CLI documentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or reviewing command help, option descriptions, HelpSpec definitions, the agents manifest, or docs/CLI.md.
Why use it?
It prevents command instructions from becoming incomplete or inconsistent across the places users and AI agents read them.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,927 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 $0.00058 $0.03927
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01963
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00785
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00393

Measured 2d ago against content hash 947c025cdbe5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ref-cli-help-standards 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/ref-cli-help-standards/SKILL.md · 103 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLI Help Standards

The dhcli CLI is described by three surfaces from two authored sources: in-code help renders both the --help text and the agents-manifest node — a HelpSpec on the root and every leaf command, a function docstring on each noun group (split into manifest summary/description by _split_help_text; see Help-content contract, Group commands) — and docs/CLI.md is written by hand. Help text is plain text rendered verbatim by click in the terminal, so it carries no reStructuredText markup. Every leaf command's help follows a fixed section contract so a human or an AI agent can operate the command without reading the source or docs/CLI.md.

1. Three surfaces, two sources

Surface Role Canonical source Edited via
docs/CLI.md Exhaustive reference docs/CLI.md docs-improve / docs-accuracy (ref-documentation-roles)
--help text Self-sufficient per-command help the command's HelpSpec (cli/_help.py, rendered by build_help) cli-help-improve / cli-help-accuracy
agents manifest Machine surface for agents (--help for AI agents) the same HelpSpec (cli/_manifest.py: build_summary_tree, build_manifest, describe_command); wired into commands by cli/_commands/agents.py cli-help-improve / cli-help-accuracy

Consistency rule. --help and the agents manifest render from the one HelpSpec, so they cannot drift from each other — the surface to reconcile by hand is docs/CLI.md: a command's flags, arguments, exit codes, error_codes, and output fields must match between the spec and the doc. Change one, update the other in the same edit. The contract tests in tests/cli/test_help_contract.py (per-command section coverage, parametrized over the live click tree), tests/cli/test__help.py (build_help rendering), and tests/cli/test__manifest.py (the manifest builders: cleanliness, node schema, content preservation) pin the spec side; tests/cli/_commands/test_agents.py pins the agents verbs' CLI behavior (output modes, config bypass, flag/verb equivalence). docs/CLI.md has no automated check — verify it by hand.

Read the full file on GitHub · 103 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 · 103 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 947c025cdbe5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ref-cli-help-standards is a skill published in the GitHub repository deephaven/deephaven-mcp (5 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 3,927 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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