Advise

Advise

The advise slice gives Claude an advisor that you control. The advisor is a stronger model that Claude asks when a problem is hard or a task is stuck. You choose its model and its effort.

What It Does for You

Claude Code has a built-in advisor. This slice offers the tool advise in its place. The tool sends one question to the model that you set, and Claude gets the advice back.

The slice is off by default. Then the built-in advisor stays, and the slice registers no tool.

How to Use It

Set the options of the plugin:

Key	Default	Meaning
advisor	builtin	builtin keeps the advisor of Claude Code. claudetto registers the tool advise.
advisorModel	opus	The model of the tool: an alias such as opus, or a model ID.
advisorEffort	high	The effort of the call: low, medium, high, xhigh, or max.

An unknown value gives the default. With claudetto, set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADVISOR_TOOL=1, so that Claude sees one advisor. The setup slice sets this env var.

How to Turn It Off

Set advisor to builtin. The slice then costs nothing. With claudetto, each call is one model request.

The Tool

The tool has one input, question. Claude says in it what it tried, what failed, and what it needs to know. The description tells Claude to put no secret in the question.

One call sends a prompt with these parts:

1. The question.
2. The failing checks of the current goal step.
3. The steps of the goal, with the current step marked.
4. The end of the conversation.

The goal comes from .claudetto/goal.json. The system prompt asks for advice that Claude can act on: the cause, the next step, and the risk. It carries a cache mark, because it stays the same between calls.

The result gives the advice with the model name and the count of tokens in and out. If the model gives no answer, the result names the cause: an API error, an empty reply, or a call that ended too soon. An empty question gives an error result.

Hooks

Hook	Filter	What it does
session.start	Each start	With advisor set to claudetto, registers the tool advise. The tool is not deferred.
tool.call	mcp__claudetto__advise	Answers a call with one model request.

Bounds

All bounds are in slices/advise/limits.ts.

Bound	Value	Meaning
CONTEXT_BYTES	24,000	The most bytes of context in one call.
MAX_TOKENS	2,048	The token cap of one piece of advice.
TIMEOUT_MS	120,000	The time limit of one call, in ms.
MAX_CALLS_PER_TURN	3	The most calls in one turn.
MAX_CALLS_PER_SESSION	20	The most calls in one session.

The context is cut in this order: the question, the failing checks, the plan, and then the conversation. Each part takes what is left of the bound. The conversation keeps its newest lines. A turn starts at the last user message with text. A /compact keeps the session id, so it does not reset the count of calls. A call over a limit gets a result that tells Claude to go on or to ask you.

See Also

• Goal
• Decide
• Setup
• Bounds