huh
Agents produce messages that are confident, dense, and not quite parseable: invented shorthand, claims with nothing behind them, a request buried inside a report. huh reads the message back in plain sentences, expands the shorthand, separates what's being reported from what's being asked, and flags which claims come with evidence and which are just confident. It decodes; it can't verify the claims for you, only mark which ones arrived unproven.
Read the Codex desktop binding when this workflow needs harness mechanics, model routing, or recovery.
Decode one message that failed its reader. The explanation translates the target and adds no unsupported facts. If this is a side question during authorized work, answer it first and then continue that work unless the user paused or canceled it. The explanation itself authorizes no new changes.
Target
Pasted text: decode that. Nothing pasted: decode your own most recent substantive message. Skip back past courtesies to the one carrying content, and use the conversation it sits in to resolve its references. A target from another session arrives without its context: resolve only what the text itself supports, and mark the rest unknown rather than guessing.
The four moves
Work every move on the target.
- Restate. Rewrite the whole message in complete plain sentences at the reader's altitude, defining every term of art in the sentence that first uses it.
- Expand the shorthand. List every codename, label, abbreviation, or numbering scheme the message coined, each mapped to plain words, or marked unknown when the target does not say.
- Split report from request. State separately what has already happened and what the reader is being asked to decide or do. When nothing is asked, say so outright; a reader hunting for a hidden question is half the confusion.
- Flag the unshown. Name each claim presented as settled that the message backs with no evidence, number, or verification. This is bookkeeping, not accusation: "stated, not shown."
Output shape
The restatement leads. After it, only the moves that found something, each a short labeled section: Shorthand expanded, What's being asked of you, Stated but not shown. The whole answer runs shorter than the target unless the target was too compressed to understand.
Done when (checkable: verify each line before reporting complete)
- Every term of art in the restatement, whether coined by the target or inherited jargon, is defined in the sentence that first uses it.
- Every coined term is expanded or marked unknown; none is silently dropped.
- The reader can quote what is being asked of them, or the answer says nothing is.
- Every settled-sounding claim either carried its evidence in the target or is flagged.
- The explanation added no unsupported fact or new scope; any ongoing work respected the latest user instructions.
Attribution
The trigger is the same human moment as Matt Pocock's wait-what (MIT): the reader stops the agent and asks it to land the message this time. His skill is a two-line re-pitch prompt; the four moves, the target rules, and the output shape here were written independently for this catalog, from failure modes observed in its own sessions.