GBrain is a memory and retrieval layer for AI agents that searches, connects, and synthesizes information from stored sources. It is used to give coding agents and autonomous agents access to knowledge beyond their current code, including shared company information with access controls. The catalogue add-ons help agents operate GBrain and connect it to agent workflows.
Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gbrainnpx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-askingWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-asking)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-asking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-asking/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-asking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/resolve-before-asking.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 42 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 90 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 108 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 5.1 | $0.00099 | $0.03256 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00040 | $0.01302 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00651 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00326 |
Grade A, and why
resolve-before-asking 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 13d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 319 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Resolve Before Asking — Exhaust the Brain Before Bothering the User
Convention: see conventions/brain-first.md for the base lookup chain (search → query → get_page → external APIs). This skill extends that chain one hop further, to the human boundary: asking the user is the LAST resort, after the brain AND external escalation, not a shortcut around them.
Convention: see _brain-filing-rules.md — pages touched by the ingest-resolution section file by primary subject (
people/,companies/).
Purpose
Never ask the user "who is X?" when the answer already exists in the brain.
The memory answers before the human is bothered — that is the product promise. This skill defines the lookup chain that runs before any entity-identification question is sent to the user, and the escalation format when asking really is justified.
The Bug This Kills
The pattern: the agent encounters an entity with a rich brain page — timeline entries, meeting history, an imported message archive — and instead of reading them, asks the user "who is X?". This is lazy escalation. It spends the user's attention on questions the system can answer itself.
Examples of the bug (anonymized):
- alice-example — her brain page already carried a role line ("Chief of Staff at acme-example") and a long meeting history → the agent still asked.
- charlie-example — a thick imported email thread whose subject lines all pointed at one shared project → the agent still asked.
When This Fires
This is a harness-routing convention, not a mechanical guarantee: route here whenever ANY of these are true —
- A reply draft contains "who is [name]?" or equivalent.
- A draft asks about someone's role, relationship, or identity.
- You are about to present an entity as "unknown" or "unidentified".
- A brain page has
[To be filled by content analysis]or similar placeholder text. - You are composing a list of people and leaving any as "unknown relationship".
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.
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.
- 13d ago Changed 34b20f246798
- 14d ago Changed · +1 lines eb3c97c71581
- 16d ago Changed · +8 lines b10843c35806
- 1mo ago First seen · 310 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A 1882c45b2e60
resolve-before-asking is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gbrain (31,034 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 3,256 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-30.
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