Show HN: Ask-human-mcp – zero-config human-in-loop hatch to stop hallucinations

[echollama]

While building my startup i kept running into the issue where ai agents in cursor create endpoints or code that shouldn't exist, hallucinates strings, or just don't understand the code.

ask-human-mcp pauses your agent whenever it’s stuck, logs a question into ask_human.md in your root directory with answer: PENDING, and then resumes as soon as you fill in the correct answer.

the pain:

your agent screams out an endpoint that never existed it makes confident assumptions and you spend hours debugging false leads

the fix:

ask-human-mcp gives your agent an escape hatch. when it’s unsure, it calls ask_human(), writes a question into ask_human.md, and waits. you swap answer: PENDING for the real answer and it keeps going.

some features:

- zero config: pip install ask-human-mcp + one line in .cursor/mcp.json → boom, you’re live - cross-platform: works on macOS, Linux, and Windows—no extra servers or webhooks. - markdown Q\&A: agent calls await ask_human(), question lands in ask_human.md with answer: PENDING. you write the answer, agent picks back up - file locking & rotation: prevents corrupt files, limits pending questions, auto-rotates when ask_human.md hits ~50 MB

the quickstart

pip install ask-human-mcp ask-human-mcp --help

add to .cursor/mcp.json and restart: { "mcpServers": { "ask-human": { "command": "ask-human-mcp" } } }

now any call like:

answer = await ask_human( "which auth endpoint do we use?", "building login form in auth.js" )

creates:

### Q8c4f1e2a ts: 2025-01-15 14:30 q: which auth endpoint do we use? ctx: building login form in auth.js answer: PENDING

just replace answer: PENDING with the real endpoint (e.g., `POST /api/v2/auth/login`) and your agent continues.

link:

github -> https://github.com/Masony817/ask-human-mcp

feedback:

I'm Mason a 19yo solo-founder at Kallro. Happy to hear any bugs, feature requests, or weird edge cases you uncover - drop a comment or open an issue! buy me a coffee -> coff.ee/masonyarbrough

[superb_dev]

This site is impossible to read on my phone. Part of the left side of the screen is cut off and I can’t scroll it into view

[tyzoid]

Completely blank for me on mobile (javascript disabled)

[rfl890]

Switching to desktop mode fixed it for me

[kbouck]

Rotate phone to landscape

[echollama]

i fixed this

[lobsterthief]

Same here

[banner520]

I also have this problem on my phone

[threeseed]

> an mcp server that lets the agent raise its hand instead of hallucinating

a) It doesn't know when it's hallucinating.

b) It can't provide you with any accurate confidence score for any answer.

c) Your library is still useful but any claim that you can make solutions more robust is a lie. Probably good enough to get into YC / raise VC though.

[echollama]

reasoning models know when they are close to hallucinating because they are lacking context or understanding and know that they could solve this with a question.

this is a streamlined implementation of a interanlly scrapped together tool that i decided to open-source for people to either us or build off of.

[loloquwowndueo]

- someone sets up an “ask human as a service mcp” - demand quickly outstrips offer of humans willing to help bots - someone else hooks up AI to the “ask human saas” - we now have a full loop of machines asking machines

[lordmauve]

Finally, the "AI" turns out to be 700 Indians. We now have the full loop of humans asking machines asking humans pretending to be machines. Civilisation collapses

[olalonde]

I built this - but mostly as a joke / proof-of-concept: https://github.com/olalonde/mcp-human

[TZubiri]

This is pretty much already possible in any economy, but quite a waste.

Not much is stopping you from buying products from a retailer and selling them at a wholesaler, but you'd lose money in doing so.

[mgraczyk]

If you are answering these questions yourself, why not just add something like this to your cursor rules?

"If you don't know the answer to a question and need the answer to continue, ask me before continuing"

Will you have some other person answer the question?

[bckr]

I’ve tried putting “stop and ask for help” in prompts/rules and it seems like Cursor + Claude, up to 3.7, is highly aligned against asking for help.

[deadbabe]

Having another person answer the question is pretty much the obvious route this will go.

[ramesh31]

>If you are answering these questions yourself, why not just add something like this to your cursor rules?

What you are asking for is AGI. We still need human in the loop for now.

[exclipy]

Would be great if it pinged me on slack or whatsapp. I wouldn't notice if it simply paused waiting for the MCP call to return

[spacecadet]

Easy enough to do with smolagents and fastmcp, its 20 lines of code.

[kjhughes]

Cool conceptually, but how exactly does the agent know when it's unsure or stuck?

[aziaziazi]

I had the same question reading your post:

> (problem description) your agent […] makes confident assumptions

> (solution description) when it’s unsure

I read this as a contradiction: in one sentence you describe the problem as an agent being confident while hallucinating and in the next phrase the solution is that the agent can ask you if it’s unsure.

You tool is interesting but you may consider rephrasing that part.

[Groxx]

The same way it knows anything else.

So not at all, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.

[echollama]

the reasoning aspect of most llms these days knows when its unsure or stuck, you can get that from its thinking tokens. It will see this mcp and call it when its in that state. Though this could benefit from some rules file to use it, although cursor doesn't quite follow ask for help rules, hence making this.

[throwaway314155]

Not certain that your definition of hallucination matches mine precisely. Having said that, this is so simple yet kinda brilliant. Surprised it's not a more popular concept already.

[atoav]

I am running an electronics/medialab in an university, the amount of fires bad electronics advice from LLMs caused already is probably non-zero.

It is amazing how bad LLMs are when it comes to reasoning about simple dynamics within trivial electronic circuits and how eager they are to insist the opposite of how things work in the real world is the secured truth.

[kordlessagain]

The same technique can be had by creating a "universal MCP tool" for the LLM to use if it thinks the existing tools aren't up to the job. The MCP language calls these "proxies".

[spacecadet]

If the model responds with an obvious incorrect answer or hallucination, start over. Rephrase your input. Consider what output you are actually after... Adding to original shit output wont help you.

[rgbrenner]

Sounds similar to `ask_followup_question` in Roo

[ddalex]

Why wouldn't a rag-enabled ai be faster and better then humans at answering these documentation-grounded questions ?

[PSBigBig]

Thanks for sharing this. Bookmarked!

[conception]

What sort of prompt are you using for this?

[kordlessagain]

The prompt is (mostly) built using the tool loads in the MCP server. In Python, the @mcp.tool() decorators provide the context of tool to the prompt, which is then submitted (I believe) with each call to the LLM.