compose:ask

Instructions for asking the user for decisions, clarification, or approval through a structured question tool.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it whenever a task needs a user choice, missing detail, or approval, including cases with several known options or an open-ended answer.
Why use it?
It prevents work from stopping with an unanswered question and defines how to proceed when the user cannot respond.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 863 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00054 $0.00863
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00432
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00173
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00086

Measured yesterday against content hash 3bb9d1e20600, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

compose: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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to compose:ask — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

packages/lfcode/src/skill/compose/.bundle/ask/SKILL.md · 59 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Asking the User

The Rule

Every time you need the user to decide, clarify, or approve something, route it through the question tool. Never stop the loop with a natural-language question ("Does this look right?", "Should I proceed?", "Which would you prefer?"). A natural-language question ends your turn without finishing the task; a question tool call does not.

This means: the loop only ends when the task is actually complete — never because you paused to ask in prose.

How to Ask

  • Structured options — when the decision has known choices, list them as options (each with a short label and a description).
  • Open-ended — when you can't enumerate good options, pass empty options. An empty options list renders as a free-text prompt: the user types whatever they want. So anything you'd normally ask in prose can be asked through question instead.
  • One question per concern — don't bundle unrelated decisions; ask them as separate questions (or separate calls).
  • Don't repeat the question in prose — the tool already renders it. Just call the tool.
question({
  questions: [{
    question: "Which auth strategy should I use?",
    header: "Auth",
    options: [
      { label: "Session cookies", description: "Server-side sessions, simplest" },
      { label: "JWT", description: "Stateless, good for multiple services" },
    ],
  }],
})

When No User Is Available

There are two situations where you won't get a human answer. The decision behavior is identical in both — you pick the best option for unattended/headless execution yourself and keep going. They differ only in whether the question tool is reached this turn:

  1. Question tool absent (e.g. run/eval, where question is denied) — the tool isn't in your list. You never call it; decide and proceed directly.
  2. [Never-Ask] response (never-ask is on) — you do call question, but instead of a user answer the tool returns a [Never-Ask] directive. Re-pick from the options you proposed, explicitly state your choice and reasoning in your response text, and continue.

Read the full file on GitHub · 59 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. yesterday First seen · 59 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 3bb9d1e20600

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compose:ask is a skill published in the GitHub repository lfyxhappy/lfcode (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 863 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to compose:ask, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.