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

The same bug hit me in three separate sessions before I fixed it properly. Each time, my orchestrator reached a decision point, tried to present its menu, and burned a turn on a validation error instead of a question: InputValidationError: { "code" : "too_big" , "maximum" : 4 , "path" : [ "questions" , 0 , "options" ] } // abridged; the full payload includes the Zod message Claude Code's AskUserQuestion tool caps every question at 4 options. My menu had 5. First strike: the end-of-run menu. Second strike: a blocker-recovery menu. Third strike: the same recovery menu two weeks later, after I thought I'd fixed it. That repetition is the story. Why this one keeps coming back A one-off validation error is not worth a blog post. What makes this one worth writing up is why it recurred: the cause wasn't a typo. It was a template. Suhail , my Claude Code orchestrator, is a set of markdown prompt files, and its menus live in those files as literal option lists: the template says exactly what to present, and the model presents it verbatim. Five options go into one AskUserQuestion call, the schema rejects it, and the round-trip to the model is wasted. In my runs the model then retried with four options and continued, which is why, the first two times, I let the retry count as the fix. The recovery is so cheap that the bug reads as a hiccup, not a defect. But decision menus are the natural accumulation point of any orchestrator. Every new capability wants a slot: continue, commit, skip, retry, abort, show status. The menu only grows. A 5-option template doesn't fail once; it fails on every run that reaches it, one wasted turn each time, until you fix the template. The failure mode worse than the error The wasted turn is the benign version. Suhail's public changelog records the malignant one: the interactive complete-handler menu grew past the cap, and instead of erroring, the presented menu simply lost its last option. The option that got pushed out of reach was Abort . Abort o