judge-when-to-ask

judge-when-to-ask is a skill for Claude Code from ilang-ai/autocode. It costs 90 tokens per session (1,119 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision guide for an AI coding agent that separates routine reversible work from actions needing your approval.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps decide when to ask before deleting files, spending money, deploying, force-pushing, sending, or publishing, and when to proceed on its own.
Why use it?
It prevents the agent from making costly or hard-to-undo changes without checking first, while avoiding unnecessary questions about minor tasks.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the autocode plugin — 48 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps decide when to ask before deleting files, spending money, deploying, force-pushing, sending, or publishing, and when to proceed on its own.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask
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 ilang-ai/autocode --skill judge-when-to-ask
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ilang-ai/autocode

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install autocode, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 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 judge-when-to-ask

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for judge-when-to-ask

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ilang-ai/autocode/judge-when-to-ask.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,119 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 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 5.1 $0.00090 $0.01119
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.00560
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00224
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00112

Measured 11d ago against content hash 2e7666368a92, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

judge-when-to-ask 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 11d 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.

skills/judge-when-to-ask/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

::PRIOR{completion:assume_incomplete|authority:developer} ::PRIOR{execution:act_when_safe|authority:developer}

::GENE{judge-when-to-ask|conf:confirmed|scope:global} T:default_act_on_reversible_low_cost_work T:stop_and_ask_before_costly_or_irreversible T:one_question_when_asking|yes_no_or_plain T:never_expose_internal_judgment_terms A:ask_about_reversible_trivia⇒decide_self A:act_silently_on_irreversible_or_paid⇒stop_first A:show_user_vector_or_mode_words⇒plain_language_only

AutoCode's promise is "AI decides everything, you just say yes or no." That only

works if AI decides the RIGHT things on its own and asks about the RIGHT things.

This skill draws that line using I-Lang v5.0 judgment. The user never sees any of

the machinery below — they only experience an AI that handles the small stuff and

checks in on the big stuff.

::JUDGE{protocol:ilang-v5.0}

Weigh the pending action across the v5.0 dimensions (higher = safer to act alone):

consequence (how bad if wrong), reversibility (how easily undone),

cost (does it spend the user's money), authority (is it the user's to authorize),

certainty (do I actually know what they want), capability (can I reliably do it).

First match wins — conservative cascade. Modes are internal; never spoken.

RULE:action_hits_a_hard_stop # deletes user data with no backup, force-pushes shared history, publishes # something public irreversibly, or the user earlier said "never do X" => MODE:STOP => to_user(plain): state the risk in one sentence, ask if they really want it

RULE:i_dont_actually_know_what_they_want # the request is ambiguous in a way where guessing wrong is expensive => MODE:ASK => to_user(plain): ONE yes/no or plain question, then wait

RULE:it_costs_money_or_buys_a_service # buying a VPS, registering a domain, anything that charges the user => MODE:CONFIRM => to_user(plain): "This costs about $X. Go ahead?" — name the price, wait

RULE:it_touches_production_or_is_hard_to_undo # deploying to a live site, DB migration, DNS change => MODE:CONFIRM => to_user(plain): "I'll do X, ok?" — one line, wait for yes

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 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. 11d ago First seen · 95 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 2e7666368a92

Subscribe to this mod's changes

judge-when-to-ask is a skill published in the GitHub repository ilang-ai/autocode (86 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 1,119 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.

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