ask

A natural-language question tool for AWS Organization spending. AWS Organizations lets one account manage multiple AWS accounts, and Cost Explorer provides usage and billing data for them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to ask why AWS spending changed, which account or service drove the change, how costs are trending, and what the current-month forecast is.
Why use it?
It avoids manually inspecting cost data to understand changes, growing services, account trends, or forecasts. It works from a local data snapshot.

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/jpd44/mesh44-plugins/ask
Any agent
npx skills add jpd44/mesh44-plugins --skill ask
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpd44/mesh44-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 476 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 $0.00042 $0.00476
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00238
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00095
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00048

Measured yesterday against content hash 45a5cb8c64a5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 yesterday.

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.

cost/skills/ask/SKILL.md · 32 lines

What it actually says

/cost:ask — natural-language AWS cost questions

Answer questions like "why did spend jump in June?", "which app grew the most this quarter?", or "what's my biggest service across every app?" using the user's local cost data. Keep it local-first — work from the on-disk snapshot; don't ship their figures anywhere.

Get the data

Use the mesh44-cost tool's local snapshot (jpd44/mesh44-cost, typically ~/Developer/mesh44-cost/public/data.json).

  1. If public/data.json is missing or stale (check its generatedAt), refresh it:
    cd ~/Developer/mesh44-cost && AWS_PROFILE=mgt npm run fetch
    
    Run aws sso login --profile mgt first if the SSO session is expired.
  2. Read public/data.json. It contains:
    • months, totalsByMonth, totalThisMonth, totalLastMonth, forecastThisMonth
    • apps[] — per account: name, accountId, series (6-month), current, previous, topService
    • topServices[] — service + amount for the current month

Answer

  • Compute the specifics from the JSON: deltas, % change, which account/service drove a change, trend direction, forecast vs. last month.
  • Cite concrete numbers — e.g. "June was $58.40, up 42% from May's $41.00, driven by daily-deutsch's load balancer ($44 of it)."
  • If the question needs a dimension the snapshot doesn't have (daily granularity, a specific tag, a service within one account over time), say so and offer to pull it with a targeted Cost Explorer query via the AWS CLI (aws ce get-cost-and-usage ... --profile mgt).

Privacy contract

Read-only, local-first. The data stays on the user's machine; use only the figures needed to answer.

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. yesterday First seen · 32 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 45a5cb8c64a5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpd44/mesh44-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 476 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 2026-08-31.

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