asta

asta is a skill for Claude Code from maxwellsdm1867/wheeler. It costs 64 tokens per session (542 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ask, MIT.

A research-task router for Asta, a set of services for finding papers, searching scholarly sources, developing theories, and producing literature reports.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find papers, look up scholarly work, theorize, or request a literature review through the matching Asta service.
Why use it?
It helps choose the appropriate Asta service instead of guessing which research tool fits the task.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Codex.

Not installable on its own: it runs a file from its repository that does not travel with it. Clone the repository, or install whatever ships that file. The line is Bash(./.venv/bin/python -c *).

Part of the wh plugin — 41 skills, 40 commands, 2 agents, 3 hooks, 5 MCP servers shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add maxwellsdm1867/wheeler
Claude Code
/plugin install wh

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install wh, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 41 skills, 40 commands, 2 agents, 3 hooks, 5 MCP servers.

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 asta

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maxwellsdm1867/wheeler/asta.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/maxwellsdm1867/wheeler/asta)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maxwellsdm1867/wheeler/asta"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maxwellsdm1867/wheeler/asta.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 542 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 78% 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 5.1 $0.00064 $0.00542
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00271
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00108
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00054

Measured 6d ago against content hash a6a2fe35ba6f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

asta 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 6d 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

This is a copy

78% identical to ask — 51 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.

skills/asta/SKILL.md · 47 lines

What it actually says

Call get_act on the wheeler_core MCP server with name="asta", then follow the returned instructions exactly. They are the authoritative definition of this act. Do not improvise the workflow or substitute your own plan for it.

Pass host="codex" when running under Codex so the orchestration guidance matches the tools this host actually has.

Mode: chat. Orchestration: skill-dispatch.

If get_act is unavailable, the Wheeler MCP servers are not connected. Say so rather than guessing at the workflow: acting without the act text is how provenance gets silently skipped.

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. 6d ago First seen · 47 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A a6a2fe35ba6f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

asta is a skill published in the GitHub repository maxwellsdm1867/wheeler (10 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 542 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 78% identical to ask, differing in 51 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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