oracle

Send the question to a bare headless Fable session and relay the answer verbatim.

Never put a heredoc inside $(...) (i.e. q=$(cat <<'EOF' ... EOF)). On macOS's stock /bin/bash (3.2 — an old pre-GPLv3 build Apple never upgraded), a heredoc nested in a command substitution breaks the parser the instant the body contains a single quote (don't, it's, any contraction) — unexpected EOF while looking for matching. It's a real bash 3.2 bug, not a wording problem, and it reproduces even for a one-word heredoc; it doesn't happen in zsh or bash 4+, which is why it's intermittent depending on what's invoking the script.

Instead, write the question to a plain text file with the Write tool (no shell parsing of the content at all, so quotes/backticks/$ are inert), then read it back with a bare $(cat file) — safe because there's no heredoc involved.

1. Write the question, plus only the minimal context Oracle needs, to <scratchpad>/oracle_question.txt (use your actual scratchpad path) with the Write tool — plain text, no heredoc, no escaping.

2. Run with the Bash tool:

Q=<scratchpad>/oracle_question.txt
mode=--safe-mode
if [ -n "$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" ]; then mode=--bare; fi
claude -p $mode --model fable --tools "WebSearch" --allowedTools "WebSearch" < /dev/null \
  --system-prompt "You are Oracle. Answer as concisely as possible — the shortest response that is still correct and complete. Lead with the answer, in the first word if possible. State it with confidence; flag uncertainty only when it would change what the user does next. When a question is ambiguous, answer the most likely reading. Search the web only when the answer needs facts newer or more specific than your knowledge; otherwise answer directly." \
  "$(cat "$Q")"

Notes: < /dev/null is required — claude -p otherwise stalls 3s waiting for stdin and prints a warning into the output. --bare (API key, off-quota) is used when ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set, else --safe-mode (OAuth, on-quota).

Rules:

• Every token in oracle_question.txt is Fable-priced. Pass the question and the few lines of context it genuinely needs — never file dumps or conversation history.
• Oracle can search the web but has no file access. If the question needs a file's contents, read the file first and paste the relevant lines into oracle_question.txt.
• Relay Oracle's answer to the user verbatim. Do not expand, soften, or re-explain it.
• If the command fails (auth, sandbox), fall back to the oracle subagent via the Agent tool and note the fallback costs ~6k tokens.