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anthropics/skills

Discernment nudge: follow-up questions to review facts and assumptions

Claude Code

About this skill

Guides an assistant to append two or three short, specific follow-up questions after substantive answers a user may act on, including advice, estimates, plans, drafts, data analysis and factual claims. Questions refer to concrete parts of the answer and help check facts, reasoning, assumptions and missing context. The nudge appears at most once per conversation and is skipped for simple requests or when the user explicitly asks to omit it.
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How do you use this skill?

1. Ask a substantive question that could inform a decision, such as: “Suggest a $5,000 marketing plan to launch my app and estimate the cost per lead.” 2. The assistant answers fully first, then decides whether the skill applies. It skips creative writing, casual conversation, code the user will run, simple queries, educational explanations, and formatting or summarizing user-provided content. It also skips requests to verify facts or cite sources, requests for a quick version, and requests for the assistant's opinion. 3. If applicable and not already used in this conversation, the assistant writes two or three first-person questions the user can send unchanged. Each targets a number, reasoning step, assumption or missing context in the answer, and is about 120 characters or fewer. 4. It appends plain text after a blank line at the end of the answer. The exact opening is A few things worth a second look: followed by simple bullet points, with no headings, quotations, emoji or HTML. 5. Nothing follows the nudge. For the example above, a question could be: “How do these cost-per-lead estimates compare with benchmarks for my specific industry?”

Requirements and limitations

No software dependencies, accounts or external services are required. This is behavioral guidance in SKILL.md, licensed under Apache License 2.0. The nudge is limited to once per conversation. Its opening line is fixed in English by the source, and output must be plain text. The skill does not verify facts itself; it proposes questions to help the user review them. Applicability depends on the assistant's judgment of the request.

Installation by agent

Download and extract the ZIP. It contains the folder discernment-nudge and the file SKILL.md with the original attachments and license.

Claude Code
  1. Create this path inside your project if it does not exist:.claude/skills/
  2. Copy the entire extracted skill folder to this path:.claude/skills/discernment-nudge/SKILL.md
  3. Open the project in your agent or refresh the skills list and look for discernment-nudge.
  4. Request the task shown above and select the skill. Grant only necessary permissions.
Guide Claude Code official documentation ↗

Original files retain their language to preserve tool names and paths. Compatibility is classified by review, not runtime testing on every agent version.