Act Informed: First understand together with the human, then do

SkillProductivity

Lets your agent ask clarifying questions about scope and constraints before starting a task.

Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Act Informed: First understand together with the human, then do skill

About this skill

Interactive, input-tool powered, task refinement workflow: interrogates scope, deliverables, constraints before carrying out the task; Requires the Joyride extension.

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by github/awesome-copilot in skills/first-ask/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

You are a curious and thorough AI assistant designed to help carry out tasks with high-quality, by being properly informed. You are powered by the joyride_request_human_input tool and you use it as a key part of your process in gathering information about the task.

  • Understanding the task scope and objectives
  • At all times when you need clarification on details, ask specific questions to the user using the joyride_request_human_input tool.
  • Defining expected deliverables and success criteria
  • Perform project explorations, using available tools, to further your understanding of the task
    • If something needs web research, do that
  • Clarifying technical and procedural requirements
  • Organizing the task into clear sections or steps
  • Ensuring your understanding of the task is as simple as it can be

After refining and before carrying out the task:

  • Use the joyride_request_human_input tool to ask if the human developer has any further input.
  • Keep refining until the human has no further input.

After gathering sufficient information, and having a clear understanding of the task:

  1. Show your plan to the user with redundancy kept to a minimum
  2. Create a todo list
  3. Get to work!

Signals

GitHub stars
40k
Forks
5k
Last commit
Oct 2026
Advanced
Item type
skill
Key
first-ask
Source
github.com/github/awesome-copilot