ask-claude

ask-claude is a skill for Claude Code from thoughtbot/rails-consultant. It costs 97 tokens per session (2,005 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guidance workflow for deciding how to ask Claude to perform a task or which Claude feature to use. It checks the project and current Anthropic documentation, then prepares a prompt for approval before running it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing between a prompt, project instructions, a hook, a skill, a subagent, a plan, or another workflow. It produces a recommended approach and a prompt to approve.
Why use it?
The wrong prompt or feature can make a task unreliable or cause an instruction to be missed. Checking the code and current documentation helps match the request to the actual project and available tools.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the rails-consultant plugin — 15 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when choosing between a prompt, project instructions, a hook, a skill, a subagent, a plan, or another workflow. It produces a recommended approach and a prompt to approve.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude
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 thoughtbot/rails-consultant --skill ask-claude
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thoughtbot/rails-consultant

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install rails-consultant, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills.

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 ask-claude

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude/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 ask-claude

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thoughtbot/rails-consultant/ask-claude.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,005 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 $0.00097 $0.02005
Opus 5.5 $0.00039 $0.00802
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00019 $0.00401
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00200

Measured today against content hash ffc413f31bbb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-claude 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 today.

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/ask-claude/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ask Claude

Two questions sound different and are the same question: how should I ask Claude to do this?

  • "Users can't sign up." The answer is a way of working (reproduce first, plan or don't, what proves it's fixed) and a prompt that says it.
  • "Run rubocop after every edit." The answer is a feature. A line in CLAUDE.md gets followed most of the time. A hook runs every time. Picking wrong means it quietly doesn't happen.

Either way, end with a prompt the user approves before anything runs.

task
  |
  v
1. look ...... the code and setup the task touches
2. read ...... the docs that apply, fetched now
3. ask ....... only what neither can tell you
4. recommend . the approach, why, and the prompt, shown for approval
5. run ....... here, as written

Two ways this fails. The answer comes from memory, and recommends a feature that's been renamed, or misses the one released last month that fits better. Or the prompt restates the task in more words and adds nothing the agent couldn't have guessed.

1. Look

The task is $ARGUMENTS, or ask for one.

Skim the README, the routes, the area the task names, recent commits there. You're looking for what the prompt can point at: the file that handles it, the pattern to copy, the test that covers it, the command that checks it. A prompt that names app/controllers/registrations_controller.rb beats one that says "the sign-up code".

Check what's already set up too: CLAUDE.md, .claude/settings.json hooks, .claude/skills/, .claude/agents/, installed skills. An installed skill that already does the job beats writing a new one, and a hook that already exists changes the answer.

Stay in the repo and its Claude setup. Don't search Slack, email, or other connected tools for context. Those hold the user's own messages, and a guess built from an old post reads like a fact. If you need something from there, ask.

2. Read the docs

Claude's features change month to month, so don't recommend from memory. Start at the indexes, pick the pages that bear on this task, and read them:

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 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. today First seen · 174 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A ffc413f31bbb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-claude is a skill published in the GitHub repository thoughtbot/rails-consultant (29 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 2,005 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-11-07.

Related

ask-claude compared with skills from other repositories

ask-claude next to 6 skills from other repositories
ModTypeStarsLast pushLicenceScanTokensWorks with
ask-claudethoughtbot/rails-consultantSkill29yesterdayMITA97Claude Code
ai-workflow-architectcbrock84/headcountSkill2.6k20d agoMITA89Claude Code
cloudflare-workers-aisecondsky/claude-skillsSkill2477d agoMITA39Claude Code
813-regulations-iso-42001jabrena/plinthSkill461yesterdayApache-2.0A77Claude Code, Codex
laravel-ai-sdkfusengine/agentsSkill3426d agoMITA35Claude Code
prompt-libraryfusengine/agentsSkill3426d agoMITA34Claude Code
prompt-creationfusengine/agentsSkill3426d agoMITA35Claude Code