Your Prompt Templates Are Tool Calls: How AskUserQuestion's 4-Option Cap Bit Me Three Times

Short summary

A debugging post about Claude Code's AskUserQuestion tool silently capping menus at 4 options, causing wasted turns and—in one case—dropping the Abort option entirely. The author traces the root cause to prompt template files rather than tool calls, and shares durable rules: bake the cap into templates, never waste a slot on auto-provided 'Other', and decide drop order at authoring time.

• •AskUserQuestion caps at 4 options per question; exceeding it wastes a turn or silently drops options
• •The Abort option was silently pushed out when a menu exceeded the cap, leaving users unable to stop a run
• •Fix: bake the 4-option cap into prompt templates and split large menus into clustered questions

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