conversation-patterns

conversation-patterns is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills. It costs 21 tokens per session (499 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to structuring conversations between people and AI, including turn-taking, shared understanding, clarification, and error repair.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing chat interactions, deciding when the AI should ask questions, and planning how it should acknowledge and fix mistakes.
Why use it?
It helps prevent conversations from becoming confusing by defining how turns begin and end and how misunderstandings are corrected.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the model-interaction-design plugin — 8 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing chat interactions, deciding when the AI should ask questions, and planning how it should acknowledge and fix mistakes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns
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 Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills --skill conversation-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install model-interaction-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 3 commands.

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 conversation-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns/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 conversation-patterns

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/conversation-patterns.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 499 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.
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 $0.00021 $0.00499
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00100
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00050

Measured 11d ago against content hash c7902f9ff599, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

conversation-patterns 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 11d 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.

claude-plugin/model-interaction-design/skills/conversation-patterns/SKILL.md · 38 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 38 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Conversation Patterns

Conversation between humans and AI follows predictable structural patterns. Designing these deliberately — rather than leaving them to model defaults — is core interaction design work.

Turn-Taking Structure

Every human-AI conversation has a rhythm. The designer decides:

  • Turn length: Short exchanges (chatbot-style) vs. long-form (essay generation). Match turn length to task complexity.
  • Turn initiation: Who speaks first? Does the AI greet, or wait? Does it ask a clarifying question before acting?
  • Turn boundaries: How does the user signal "I'm done"? How does the AI signal "I need more"?

Repair Sequences

Conversations break down. Repair is how they recover:

  • Self-repair: The AI detects its own error and corrects ("Actually, let me revise that...")
  • Other-repair: The user corrects the AI ("No, I meant the other one")
  • Clarification requests: The AI asks for disambiguation before proceeding
  • Graceful misunderstanding: The AI acknowledges confusion without frustrating the user Design repair sequences explicitly. Don't rely on the model to improvise them.

Grounding

Grounding is how participants establish shared understanding:

  • Confirmation: "Just to confirm, you want me to..."
  • Summarisation: "So far we've covered X, Y, and Z"
  • Reference resolution: Handling pronouns, anaphora, and ambiguous references
  • Context anchoring: Reminding the user what the AI knows and doesn't know

Dialogue Structure Patterns

Common structural patterns for human-AI conversation:

  • Interview: AI asks questions, user answers, AI synthesises
  • Co-creation: Turn-by-turn collaborative building
  • Instruction-execution: User gives command, AI performs, user evaluates
  • Exploration: Open-ended back-and-forth to discover possibilities
  • Guided workflow: AI leads the user through a multi-step process Choose the pattern that matches the task. Don't default to instruction-execution for everything.

Read the full file on GitHub · 38 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. 11d ago First seen · 38 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A c7902f9ff599

Subscribe to this mod's changes

conversation-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills (172 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 499 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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