asking-user-questions

asking-user-questions is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JetBrains/thinkrail. It costs 43 tokens per session (948 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of guidelines for writing questions inside a workflow that asks the user for information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing workflow steps that need user choices or details before continuing.
Why use it?
It helps workflows collect several related answers in one clear question round and handle missing or free-form replies.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when designing workflow steps that need user choices or details before continuing.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions
About the project

JetBrains/thinkrail is a desktop and mobile client that embeds the pi coding agent inside an interface for editing code and managing development workspaces. Developers use it to work on Git repositories through separate worktrees, a Monaco editor, terminals, Git views, specifications, and concurrent agent sessions. The catalogue entries are skills and instructions for its agent-based development workflow.

JetBrains/thinkrail · 427 stars · on GitHub · thinkrail.ai

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 JetBrains/thinkrail --skill asking-user-questions
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JetBrains/thinkrail

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 asking-user-questions

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions/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 asking-user-questions

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jetbrains/thinkrail/asking-user-questions.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 948 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00043 $0.00948
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00474
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00190
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00095

Measured 9d ago against content hash 8725dace0254, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

asking-user-questions 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 9d 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.

packages/pi-thinkrail-workflow/skills/asking-user-questions/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Asking User Questions

The workflow family's shared norms for ask_user_question: how to compose rounds, shape options, and degrade when answers don't come. Process skills name this concept at the steps that ask; when to ask — and where the answers get recorded — stays with the referencing skill.

Rounds, not chat turns

  • One call = one round: up to 4 questions, 2–4 options each. Group everything the current step needs into a single round — never chain a second call straight after for a trivial follow-up.
  • The call ends your turn. The questionnaire is shown and your run stops; the answers arrive as the next user message (a structured "User has answered your questions:" message). Don't keep working on the blocked step after calling, and don't assume an answer until it arrives — whether that is seconds later or days later.
  • If the user replies with a free-form message instead of answering the card, that reply supersedes the round — treat it as their answer, and re-ask only what is still genuinely undecided.
  • Resolve the round, act on what you learned, and open a new round only when the answers raised a genuinely new question.

Options

  • Recommended option first, label suffixed "(Recommended)", plus a one-line recommendedReason saying why you recommend it over the alternatives (shown inline under the option as a Why: line).
  • Every option: a concise label (1–5 words, ≤ 60 chars) + a description carrying the trade-off or consequence of choosing it. Tailor options to the work at hand — never generic placeholders.
  • Options must be decidable by the asked user: frame them as observable behavior or outcomes ("collapsing a project stays collapsed after a rename"), never as implementation mechanics ("semantic guard", "activation ref"). If candidate options differ only internally — identical observable behavior — don't ask: decide yourself and record the reasoning in the workflow's artifact.
  • Never author your own "Other", free-text, or escape options — the tool adds a free-text row to every question and an always-available Skip, and reserved labels are rejected. This holds under multiSelect too: the free-text row stays and is additive — a typed answer arrives alongside the checked options, it does not replace them.
  • multiSelect: true when several answers are valid at once (feature checklists); single-select when confirming something or choosing one path.
  • options[].preview (markdown) when a concrete artifact — code, a config, a mockup — is clearer shown than described. Single-select only.
  • header is a short chip, ≤ 16 characters.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 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. 9d ago First seen · 67 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 8725dace0254

Subscribe to this mod's changes

asking-user-questions is a skill published in the GitHub repository JetBrains/thinkrail (427 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 948 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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