Ask questions if underspecified
Makes the agent stop and ask instead of filling a gap in the requirements with a plausible guess.
Installation
$ npx skills add trailofbits/skillsThe CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in trailofbits/skills, not ask-questions-if-underspecified alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.
Summary
Makes the agent stop and ask instead of filling a gap in the requirements with a plausible guess.
- Reach for it when any task where a confidently wrong assumption costs more than the round trip of asking.
- Sits in Plan & specify — turning an intention into something an agent can execute without inventing the requirements as it goes.
- Stack-agnostic — nothing in it assumes a particular language or framework.
- Published by Trail of Bits. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
- Installing pulls the whole trailofbits/skills repository: this catalogue lists 12 other entries from it, and the repo may hold more.
Where it sits in delivery
Plan & specifyTurning an intention into something an agent can execute without inventing the requirements as it goes.Everything in Plan →
The skill itself
The full text lives with its publisher and changes when they change it. Read it there rather than here — a mirrored copy of somebody else's procedure goes stale silently, and this page would have no way of telling you.
Related
More in Plan & specify
- Define goalShapes intent into a measurable objective with explicit evidence and bounded scope, rather than a description of activity.
openai/skills - BrainstormingPulls a vague idea apart into options and trade-offs before anything is committed to a plan.
obra/superpowers - Constraint-driven developmentStates the constraints — budget, latency, compatibility, blast radius — as inputs rather than discovering them in review.
addyosmani/agent-skills - Context engineeringDeliberately curating what the agent sees and when — the single biggest lever on output quality.
addyosmani/agent-skills - Planning & task breakdownDecomposes a feature into tasks small enough that each one can be finished and verified independently.
addyosmani/agent-skills - Spec-driven developmentWrite the specification first, then let the implementation be judged against it rather than against taste.
addyosmani/agent-skills