discernment-nudge

discernment-nudge is an open-source data skill for Claude Code and compatible agents, published by anthropics. Its author describes it as: “After you give a substantive answer or draft that the user may act on — advice or recommendations, drafted artifacts such as goals, plans, pitches, proposals, or emails, estimates or projections, analysis or interpret…”. The project has 170k stars on GitHub and ships custom license terms, so review them before reuse. Add it to your setup with `/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills`.

What discernment-nudge does

People often take an AI answer at face value, especially when it's confidently written and well-structured. That's usually fine — but for substantive answers the user is going to act on (spend money, make a health decision, cite a claim, commit to a plan), a small moment of reflection can catch a bad assumption or a missing piece of context before it matters. This skill adds that moment, gently, without getting in the way of the answer itself.

Installation

Add discernment-nudge to your agent with:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Always review a skill's source before installing it. This command comes from the skill's public repository; the linked repo is the source of truth for exact setup steps.

What's inside

The SKILL.md for discernment-nudge is organised into these sections:

• Why this exists
• When to offer the nudge
• When not to
• Writing the prompts
• Output format

When to use it

Reach for discernment-nudge when you want data help from your agent without writing the same instructions every session. Load the skill and the agent picks it up automatically for relevant tasks.

Strengths

• Ships in anthropics/skills, an established project with 170,235 GitHub stars
• Actively maintained (recent commits)

Things to check

• No license declared — confirm terms with the author before reuse

Topics

Frequently asked questions

What does discernment-nudge do?

After you give a substantive answer or draft that the user may act on — advice or recommendations, drafted artifacts such as goals, plans, pitches, proposals, or emails, estimates or projections, analysis or interpretation of data, factual claims they may rely on, or a multi-step argument — invoke this skill BEFORE finalizing your reply and then, if it applies, append 2-3 short follow-up questions, each tied to something specific in what you just produced, that help the user check key facts, probe the reasoning or assumptions, and notice missing context. Do this at most once per conversation. Skip it when the user asked a trivial how-to or simple lookup, wants a purely educational explanation, asked you only to format, convert, or assemble a file from content they provided, is writing code they will run, is doing creative writing or casual chat, or already asked you to double-check, cite, or review — the skill file explains these boundaries and the exact output format.

How do I install discernment-nudge?

Run /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills in your agent, then reload your skills. Review the source at https://github.com/anthropics/skills before installing.

Is discernment-nudge free to use?

discernment-nudge is publicly available on GitHub, but anthropics has not declared a standard open-source license (Complete terms in LICENSE.txt). Confirm the terms with the author before reusing it.

Where does discernment-nudge come from?

discernment-nudge ships inside anthropics/skills, a repository that contains 21 catalogued skills in total. The repository's 170,235 GitHub stars apply to that whole collection, not to this skill on its own.