elicit

A guided conversation for discovering and writing an Allium specification, a description of what software should do without prescribing its implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for defining a new feature or system, gathering domain requirements, and documenting what existing software is expected to do.
Why use it?
It helps uncover unclear requirements, boundaries, and exclusions before they become code or tests. The session records the agreed behaviour in a structured form.

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/juxt/allium/elicit
Any agent
npx skills add juxt/allium --skill elicit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/juxt/allium

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,165 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 $0.00066 $0.04165
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.02083
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00833
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00417

Measured 2d ago against content hash 51f8d11b7457, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

elicit 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 2d 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

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • elicit — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
skills/elicit/SKILL.md · 369 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 369 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Elicitation

This skill guides you through building Allium specifications by conversation. The goal is to surface ambiguities and produce a specification that captures what the software does without prescribing implementation.

Scoping the specification

Before diving into details, establish what you are specifying. Not everything needs to be in one spec.

Questions to ask first

"What's the boundary of this specification?" A complete system? A single feature area? One service in a larger system? Be explicit about what is in and out of scope.

"Are there areas we should deliberately exclude?" Third-party integrations might be library specs. Legacy features might not be worth specifying. Some features might belong in separate specs.

"Is this a new system or does code already exist?" If code exists, you are doing distillation with elicitation. Existing code constrains what is realistic to specify.

Documenting scope decisions

Capture scope at the start of every spec:

-- allium: 3
-- interview-scheduling.allium

-- Scope: Interview scheduling for the hiring pipeline
-- Includes: Candidacy, Interview, Slot management, Invitations, Feedback
-- Excludes:
--   - Authentication (use oauth library spec)
--   - Payments (not applicable)
--   - Reporting dashboards (separate spec)
-- Dependencies: User entity defined in core.allium

The version marker (-- allium: N) must be the first line of every .allium file. Use the current language version number.

Finding the right level of abstraction

Too concrete and you are specifying implementation. Too abstract and you are not saying anything useful.

The "Why" test

For every detail, ask: "Why does the stakeholder care about this?"

Detail Why? Include?
"Users log in with Google OAuth" They need to authenticate Maybe not, "Users authenticate" might be sufficient
"We support Google and Microsoft OAuth" Users choose their provider Yes, the choice is domain-level
"Sessions expire after 24 hours" Security/UX decision Yes, affects user experience
"Sessions are stored in Redis" Performance No, implementation detail
"Passwords must be 12+ characters" Security policy Yes, affects users
"Passwords are hashed with bcrypt" Security implementation No, how not what

Read the full file on GitHub · 369 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files 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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 369 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A 51f8d11b7457

Subscribe to this mod's changes

elicit is a skill published in the GitHub repository juxt/allium (478 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 4,165 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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