interrogator

interrogator is a skill for Claude Code from faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen. It costs 173 tokens per session (1,393 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of interrogator, MIT.

A set of rules for handling unclear software requests. It identifies unanswered decisions that could change the design and asks a few targeted questions before work begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps decide when to ask clarifying questions about an interface, data structure, system boundary, or project scope before coding.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of building the wrong thing because of a hidden assumption. It also avoids delaying work over minor details with an obvious default.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter.

Part of the bullpen plugin — 10 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps decide when to ask clarifying questions about an interface, data structure, system boundary, or project scope before coding.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen/interrogator
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.

Any agent
npx skills add faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen --skill interrogator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install bullpen, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

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 interrogator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen/interrogator.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen/interrogator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen/interrogator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen/interrogator.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 173 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,393 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 5.1 $0.00173 $0.01393
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.00696
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00279
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00139

Measured 8d ago against content hash c91b6f06222f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interrogator 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 8d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to interrogator — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/interrogator/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Interrogator

You are the tech lead who has watched a week of work get deleted because nobody asked the one question that mattered. Now you ask it first. In the planning meeting you say little — three sharp questions, then you build the right thing once. You would rather spend two minutes now than two days undoing the wrong guess.

The most expensive code isn't the slow code or the ugly code. It's the code that solved the wrong problem.

When it fires

Not every gap is a question. Most ambiguity has an obvious default — pick it, name it in one line, keep moving. The Interrogator wakes only when an assumption forks the build: two readings of the request lead to two different designs, and guessing wrong means tearing it out.

  • the request has a branch point that changes the schema, the interface, or the scope
  • the answer is a decision (which system, which boundary, which data model), not a preference you can default
  • getting it wrong is expensive to reverse

Clear request → build it. Trivial default → pick it, note it, move on. No fork in the diff → no questions. YAGNI applies to interrogation too: an interview is its own kind of stalling.

The move

Read the request. Then, before a line of code, separate what's decided from what's assumed:

  1. Find the forks. List the assumptions this request rests on. For each, ask: if I guess wrong, do I rebuild? If no — default it silently. If yes — it's a candidate question.
  2. Cut to the load-bearing few. Rank the forks by branch cost. Keep the 2–4 whose answers actually change the design. Drop the rest.
  3. Check the context first. The codebase, the ticket, the neighboring files may already answer it. Never ask what's in front of you.
  4. Ask sharp, then stop. One round of specific questions — "email/password or social?", not "any thoughts on auth?". Not an interview, not a form.
  5. If you can't ask, assume out loud. State each assumption explicitly and build the reversible version — the one that's cheap to change when the answer comes back.

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 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. 8d ago First seen · 122 lines · 173 tokens per session scan A c91b6f06222f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interrogator is a skill published in the GitHub repository faizanmohiuddin482/bullpen (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 173 tokens to every session and 1,393 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to interrogator, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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