ask_chain
Thread a question through ordered AI pipeline stages that draft, critique, and refine prior answers. Best for sequential refinement such as cost-tiered drafting or draft-to-red-team-to-decide.
Instructions
DIRECTIONAL, SEQUENTIAL — the relay counterpart to ask_council. Where the council asks N models the SAME question in parallel and synthesizes their independent answers ('what's true?'), the chain threads a question through an ORDERED pipeline where each stage refines the last ('make this answer better'). The operator sets the order as a pipeline string like 'm3 > glm > deepseek > fable' (or an ordered models array). Stage 1 drafts; each middle stage is told to solve independently and CRITIQUE the prior draft before extending it (an anti-anchoring guard); the final stage DECIDES, seeing all prior stages as anonymized peers. Best for two things a council can't do: cost-tiered escalation (a cheap/fast model does the legwork, Fable finalizes) and explicit draft → red-team → decide pipelines. Costs MORE latency than a council (stages run sequentially, not in parallel), so reserve it for when the ordered refinement is the point. Draft → critique → refine is also a natural IDEATION pipeline: a cheap model brainstorms broadly, later stages prune and sharpen the ideas. Order matters and repeats are allowed ('fable > glm > fable' = draft, critique, re-decide). A mid-chain model that refuses/errors is skipped (recorded); if the final stage fails, Fable synthesizes the survivors. The result carries a recommendation_drift trail and material_drift flag — the chain analogue of the council's consensus signal — so you can see whether the answer was refined or just rubber-stamped. Same scope as ask: broad and conceptual engineering questions (including brainstorming) are fine; direct offensive-security asks and non-software domain knowledge (biology/medicine refused; neuroscience, cognitive science, AI/ML, and CS are in-scope) are refused. Aliases: 'm3' = minimax, 'opus5' = opus. Any stage can be 'opus' (Claude Opus 5) — a cheaper, faster terminus than Fable, e.g. 'm3 > opus'. The group token 'twin' (aka 'twin flames') expands in place to two stages, fable then opus, so 'm3 > twin' is a cheap draft finished by both Anthropic reasoners in turn. Default pipeline if none given: minimax > fable.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| models | No | The ordered pipeline as an array (alternative to `pipeline`), e.g. ['minimax','glm','fable']. Order-sensitive; duplicates allowed. | |
| context | No | Optional code snippets, file paths, or structural context (seen by every stage). | |
| session | No | Optional coordination key for the cross-agent hub (`session_list` / `session_peek`). Reuse the same key across agents working the same decision so turns group together. Defaults to the tool name (`ask_council` / `ask_chain` / `ask_debate` / …) when omitted. | |
| pipeline | No | The ordered pipeline as a string, e.g. 'm3 > glm > deepseek > fable'. Split on '>'. Order matters and repeats are allowed. Aliases: 'm3' = minimax. The group token 'twin' (aka 'twin flames') expands in place to two stages, fable then opus — positionally, so a member you also name elsewhere in the pipeline runs twice (repeats are legitimate here and are not collapsed). Ignored when `models` is given. | |
| question | Yes | A specific software/engineering question to thread through the pipeline. | |
| context_ref | No | Key(s) of context saved with `context_write` to pull in and prepend to `context`. |