askuser-protocol

A set of rules for handling missing information and user questions between an orchestrator and its subagents. An orchestrator is the part that delegates work to smaller agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when coordinating delegated document tasks that may require missing inputs, confirmation, or a clearly structured blocker report.
Why use it?
It keeps subagents from asking users questions directly and gives them a consistent format for reporting information they need before continuing.

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/quantumentangled-dev/ai-docs-plugin/askuser-protocol
Any agent
npx skills add quantumentangled-dev/ai-docs-plugin --skill askuser-protocol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/quantumentangled-dev/ai-docs-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 418 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 $0.00041 $0.00418
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00209
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00084
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00042

Measured yesterday against content hash a92089b7f3cb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

askuser-protocol 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.

skills/askuser-protocol/SKILL.md · 44 lines

What it actually says

askuser-protocol

Hard rules (subagent)

  • MUST NOT call AskUserQuestion.
  • MUST NOT emit prose questions directed at the user.
  • MUST NOT embed AskUserQuestion invocation syntax in the response body.
  • MUST surface a Blocker Report when required input is missing from the dispatch prompt.

Blocker Report format

Final response shape when missing input:

## Missing Inputs

| Parameter | Type | Expected Values | Rationale |
|-----------|------|-----------------|-----------|
| <name>    | <type> | <values>      | <why needed> |

**Blocker**: Cannot proceed without the above. Re-delegate with these values injected.

A Blocker Report is NOT a success and NOT a Refusal. It's a distinct output the orchestrator routes specifically.

Output shapes (final message must be exactly one)

  1. Success — opens with the success-line declared by the subagent's own contract (e.g. Published:, Unpublished:, Proposal:).
  2. Refusal — opens with Refusal: + brief reason. Operation will not be retried with the same inputs.
  3. Blocker Report — opens with ## Missing Inputs. Orchestrator collects values + re-dispatches.
  4. Tool error verbatim — wrapped script's stderr passed through. Orchestrator treats as Refusal unless context suggests retry.

Never emit a success opener when no operation ran. Never embed a user-directed question — surface a Blocker Report instead.


Pattern informed by MoAI-ADK (Apache 2.0). Paraphrased; no verbatim text reuse.

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 · 44 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A a92089b7f3cb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

askuser-protocol is a skill published in the GitHub repository quantumentangled-dev/ai-docs-plugin (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 418 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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