answer-open-question-with-alternative

answer-open-question-with-alternative is a skill for Claude Code from uHappyLogic/cairn. It costs 31 tokens per session (2,067 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for answering one open project question by choosing one of its listed alternatives. It records that choice in the current milestone's requirements document and commits it separately.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps resolve a named open or deferred question when several alternatives have already been analyzed.
Why use it?
It turns an unresolved decision into a documented project decision while preserving the reasoning and follow-up effects.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Part of the cairn plugin — 22 skills, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit It helps resolve a named open or deferred question when several alternatives have already been analyzed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative
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 uHappyLogic/cairn --skill answer-open-question-with-alternative
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/uHappyLogic/cairn

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cairn, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 3 agents.

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 answer-open-question-with-alternative

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative/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 answer-open-question-with-alternative

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uhappylogic/cairn/answer-open-question-with-alternative.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,067 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 $0.00031 $0.02067
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01033
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00413
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00207

Measured yesterday against content hash 25a9d7e2af24, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

answer-open-question-with-alternative 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.

.agents/plugins/cairn/skills/answer-open-question-with-alternative/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

answer-open-question-with-alternative

Records a named <alternative> from one open question's embedded analysis as its answer inline, in the current conversation — never in a subagent — so the recording reasoning (which block was resolved, which alternative was chosen, what decision was folded in, what cascaded) stays in context for follow-up.

This is the sibling of answer-open-question-with-recommendation: same recommend-sweep annotations, same recording core, but the answer is the <alternative> you name by its id rather than the one <recommendation> the sweep picked — which lets you record a decision that overrides the recommendation, or resolve a question the sweep left genuinely tied. There is deliberately no batch or agent form of this skill; to record every recommendation-bearing question at its recommended option unattended, use /answer-all-open-questions-with-recommendation.

Invocation

/answer-open-question-with-alternative <Short Title>. <Alternative Id>

Split the argument on the first . — exactly as answer-open-question does. Everything before it is <Short Title> (the question handle); everything after it is <Alternative Id> (the id of the <alternative> to record). Trim surrounding whitespace from both halves.

  • <Short Title> must match (case-insensitive, against the block's id) an existing <open-question status="open|deferred"> block that the /recommend-all-open-questions sweep has already annotated with <alternative> elements.
  • <Alternative Id> must match (case-insensitive, against the id attribute) one of that block's embedded <alternative id="..."> elements.

The procedure resolves the current milestone itself, so nothing needs to be looked up first.

Workflow

1. Find the current milestone

Follow .agents/plugins/cairn/shared/get-current-milestone.md to resolve <MILESTONE_DIR>. Never use a hardcoded task-list path. Hold <MILESTONE_DIR> — you need it for the delegated recording and the commit.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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 Changed · +3 lines 25a9d7e2af24
  2. 2d ago Changed · -3 lines 54e4238b15d0
  3. 4d ago Changed · -45 lines · -60 tokens per session 4e271773e46a
  4. 9d ago First seen · 197 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A fea828ed9e97

Subscribe to this mod's changes

answer-open-question-with-alternative is a skill published in the GitHub repository uHappyLogic/cairn (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,067 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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