Trail of Bits/ask-questions-if-underspecified — Agent Skills | officialskills.sh
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ask-questions-if-underspecified

officialai-tools

Guides an AI agent to pause and ask clarifying questions when a request has ambiguous objectives, unclear scope, or missing constraints.

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Setup & Installation

npx skills add https://github.com/trailofbits/skills --skill ask-questions-if-underspecified
or paste the link and ask your coding assistant to install it
https://github.com/trailofbits/skills/tree/main/plugins/ask-questions-if-underspecified
View on GitHub

What This Skill Does

Guides an AI agent to pause and ask clarifying questions when a request has ambiguous objectives, unclear scope, or missing constraints. The agent asks 1-5 targeted questions before doing any work, offers multiple-choice options with defaults, and waits for answers before proceeding.

Without this skill, agents make plausible-but-wrong assumptions and produce work that must be thrown out; structured upfront questions eliminate entire branches of wasted effort.

When to use it

  • Asking about target file scope before a refactor that could touch dozens of files
  • Getting confirmation on compatibility requirements before upgrading a dependency
  • Clarifying acceptance criteria before writing tests for an underspecified feature
  • Resolving ambiguous rollback requirements before running a data migration
  • Confirming which components are in-scope before a performance optimization pass

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