awask — your agent asks you a question, and acts on your answer

An agent that needs a human has one channel today: prose in a terminal. That channel loses. The deciding sentence sits in paragraph four, you are in another window, and the run sits idle for forty minutes because nothing told you it was waiting.

awask makes the ask a thing instead of a line of text: a small structured card in a durable store, rendered by every surface, whose answer is carried back into the run that raised it.

pip install awask

Python 3.9+. Zero dependencies — standard library only. The store is a directory of JSON files, so this is the entire setup: no server, no login, no network, nothing to start before it works.

Ask something

awask ask "Ship the migration now, or hold for review?" \
  --summary "Tests pass. The rollback path is untested." \
  --fact "312 rows affected" \
  --fact "rollback has never been run against prod data" \
  --option "ship|Ship it|live in ~2 min, rollback unproven" \
  --option "hold|Hold for review|no risk, blocks tonight's release" \
  --recommend hold --default hold --urgency high

Returns immediately. Your agent keeps working; you answer at your own pace.

awask list                      # what is waiting on you
awask show <id>                 # one card in full
awask answer <id> hold          # pick an option
awask steer <id> "check the FK constraint first"   # guidance; card stays open
awask cancel <id>               # withdraw it — you solved it yourself

Use | as the option separator, never : — a Windows path in a consequence (C:\data) silently mangles with the colon form.

Close the loop in Claude Code

The CLI alone gives you cards when an agent types the command, and delivers your answer at your next prompt. To make it automatic:

awask install-hooks          # this project
awask install-hooks --user   # every project
awask install-hooks --dry-run

That writes three hooks and merges three entries into settings.json:

The middle one is the one people skip and the one that matters. Without it you can answer a card and the agent never learns you did — the card renders, you click, the store records a resolution, and the run carries on as though nobody replied. Every component reports success.

Your existing settings.json is merged, never replaced; re-running is a no-op; a malformed settings file is refused rather than overwritten; and every hook is run with --self-test after being written, because a copy is not an install.

The five fields that make a card decidable

A card that cannot be answered from a phone lock screen is not finished.

1. Title — one line, the whole ask. If it needs two, raise two cards.
2. Facts — what you measured, not what you guess. Highest-value field here.
3. Options — each with a consequence. A label says what a choice is called; a consequence says what happens to your machine. Only the consequence lets someone decide without reading the code.
4. --recommend — say what you would do. A card with no recommendation pushes your thinking onto the human.
5. --default — what happens if nobody ever answers. Required: a card is only safe to ignore if it says what ignoring it does. An agent that cannot name a default is not blocked on a decision, it is blocked on doing its own thinking.

When to raise one — the bar is high

A card is an interruption. The default is to keep working. Raise one only when all three hold:

1. The answers lead to materially different work, and
2. A wrong guess costs real work to undo — time, money, data, or something outward-facing, and
3. You cannot settle it yourself by reading, measuring, or taking the conventional default.

If any clause fails: decide it, say so in one line, keep going. "Should I continue?" is the anti-pattern.

From Python

from awask import DecisionCard, DecisionOption, get_store

card = get_store().create(DecisionCard(
    title="Two schema designs, both defensible",
    options=[
        DecisionOption(key="a", label="Single table", consequence="faster reads, wide rows"),
        DecisionOption(key="b", label="Join table", consequence="normalized, extra hop"),
    ],
    recommend="b", default="b",
))
print(card.id)

Answering from elsewhere

awask list/show/answer/cancel read the store on local disk directly, so a fresh install works with nothing running. Reaching those cards from another device — a phone, a browser, a dashboard — needs a small local HTTP daemon serving the same store, bound to loopback and fronted by a private tunnel or an authenticated proxy. Never publish that port: it serves the queue that steers an agent with filesystem access.

Nothing starts that daemon for you, deliberately — registering a background service is a bigger ask than installing a CLI. The cost is worth naming: if it is not running, remote surfaces have no cards to show, and an empty list looks exactly like "nothing is waiting on you". A client that cannot reach it should say so.

Delivery to a chat DM

awask.channels bridges cards to a Discord/Telegram/Slack direct message — your bot, your token, bound to your user id. It is a DM bridge, not a channel bot, and that is the entire security model: a card answer steers an agent with filesystem access, so "who may answer" is an authorization decision. It fails closed at every path — no config, no bound owner, a sender who is not the owner, or a message that is not in a DM, all deny. A message in a public channel cannot answer a card even when you typed it.

Licence

Apache 2.0.