taylorleese Ask another LLM
Sends context to a non-Claude frontier model and returns its response. Useful for second opinions on code review, architecture decisions, and implementation plans — especially when you want a perspective that isn't Claude's.
Providers come in two flavors. CLI providers drive a locally installed agent that authenticates against the user's own subscription, so no API key is involved. HTTP providers call a REST endpoint and need a key.
Usage
Pipe the context on stdin. Never pass context as a command-line argument — it is frequently long enough to hit argument-length limits, and quoting breaks on code.
echo "<context>" | python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/ask-llm/scripts/ask.py" --provider codex
For long or multi-line context, write it to a scratch file first and redirect:
python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/ask-llm/scripts/ask.py" --provider codex < /path/to/context.md
Options
| Flag | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
--provider |
yes | codex, agy, or deepseek |
--question |
no | A specific question about the context. Omit it to request a general second opinion. |
--model |
no | Override the provider's default model |
--list |
no | Print every provider's live readiness and exit. Takes no stdin. |
Checking what is usable
Run --list before picking a provider if you are unsure what is configured on this machine, or when a call has just failed:
python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/ask-llm/scripts/ask.py" --list
It reports one of ready, disabled, missing, unauthenticated, or unknown per provider, with the exact remediation in the detail column, and
exits non-zero if nothing is usable. It never makes a model call, so it is cheap and safe to run.
Disabling providers
ASK_LLM_DISABLED_PROVIDERS is a comma-separated list of providers to switch off — a provider whose key you do not have, or whose account is not
eligible:
export ASK_LLM_DISABLED_PROVIDERS=deepseek
Disabled providers are refused before any network or subprocess call. Never pick a disabled provider, and never include one in an all-style
comparison — treat it as though it does not exist rather than surfacing its error to the user.
Choosing a provider
codex— OpenAI's coding agent, run locally. Needs no API key and is the strongest choice for code. Reasons before answering, so expect seconds rather than milliseconds. Prefer it for anything substantive.agy— Antigravity, Google's coding agent, run locally. Needs no API key. Comparable depth tocodex, and a genuinely different vendor, so it is the best partner for acodexcross-check.deepseek— strong on code (deepseek-chat), cheap, and by far the fastest. Good for a quick sanity check.
The CLI agents are roughly 4x slower than DeepSeek — about 5-7 seconds against 1.4 — because they reason before answering. That is the tradeoff for depth and for needing no API key.
All three are different vendors — codex (OpenAI), agy (Google), deepseek (DeepSeek) — so for consensus just run them concurrently in a single
message and summarize where they agree and disagree.
One constraint specific to agy: it ignores stdin, so the context travels in the command-line argument and is capped at 256 KB. Anything larger is
refused with a clear error — send it to codex instead, which reads stdin and has no such limit.
Configuration
Only the provider being asked needs to be configured. CLI providers need their binary on PATH and already authenticated; this script never reads or transmits an API key for them.
| Provider | Transport | Auth | Model override |
|---|---|---|---|
codex |
CLI | codex on PATH + codex login |
ASK_LLM_CODEX_MODEL |
agy |
CLI | agy on PATH, authenticated on first run |
ASK_LLM_AGY_MODEL |
deepseek |
HTTP | DEEPSEEK_API_KEY |
ASK_LLM_DEEPSEEK_MODEL |
Because the script runs via Bash, API keys must be exported in the shell profile that Claude Code inherits (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc) — not in a project
.env file, which is not loaded.
If a key is missing, or a required CLI is absent, the script exits 1 and says exactly what to set or install.
When authentication fails
CLI logins are interactive — a device code or a browser OAuth flow — so they cannot be completed from a tool call, and attempting one headlessly will
hang until it times out. When the script reports is not authenticated, do this instead:
- Relay the exact command it names (for example
codex login). - Tell the user they can run it in this session by typing
! codex login, since the flow needs their terminal. - Offer to retry the original question once they confirm, or to use a different
readyprovider now. - If the failure is a permanent ineligibility rather than a lapsed session — the message says so — suggest adding that provider to
ASK_LLM_DISABLED_PROVIDERSso it stops surfacing.
Never retry the same provider hoping it resolves itself, and never try to script the login.
Guidance
- Include enough context to be useful — the relevant code, the constraint, and what has already been tried. A bare question gets a generic answer.
- CLI providers run read-only —
codexin a read-only sandbox and ephemeral,agyinplanmode — so they cannot modify the working tree. - Everything you send leaves the machine for a third-party provider. Do not include secrets, credentials, or customer data.
- The response is another model's opinion, not ground truth. Weigh it, say where you disagree, and never relay it as settled fact.
- The script has no dependencies and needs no install step. Failures are a missing key, a missing CLI, a network error, or an upstream error — all reported verbatim on stderr.