Powerful Help for AI Coding
The ServiceNow-SDK skill is published to guide your AI powered development from Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf and more. It includes an "explain" feature to give actionable details to the agent in order to create properly formatted and organized Fluent and a super cool "query" feature to give it context of the data on your instance.
My spending went through the roof unexpectedly
Recently I was trying to debug why my Claude Code usage spend had skyrocketed. I am talking $75 an hour for seemingly straightforward tasks (i.e. no looping, no multiple agent teams running simultaneously, etc.). Inspecting the output from my prompts I realized that it was being very inefficient with the use of now-sdk.
We all know the issue
The problem, of course, is that AI can be almost TOO effective and will figure out how to make it work. This can hide a misconfigured toolset that could save a lot of time and money. It wasn't clear to me at first, but my ServiceNow SDK Skill (not the same as the @servicenow/sdk NPM package) was installed but not actually loading in my project. Claude was using "now-sdk explain" correctly, causing me to think everything was good, but on closer inspection I saw that it would veer into things like repeatedly scanning the SDK's source code, unnecessary extra queries to the instance to find examples, and occasionally even web searches to figure things out.
Make it work
Scope it correctly
The primary mistake I made was to install it into Claude Code globally. It works best when installed on a per-project basis, and this is true of other AI tools as well. I uninstalled it globally and went back to my project and installed it locally.
Other tools vary, but in my case with Claude Code the solution was to follow the setup instructions and choose "Install for all collaborators on this repository (project scope)".
Add it to your project settings
For Claude Code you can add it to your `.claude/settings.json` file. I use this one in my projects to explicitly enable the plugin and to give it permissions to call now-sdk explain.
{
"$schema": "https://json.schemastore.org/claude-code-settings.json",
"permissions": {
"allow": [
"Bash(npx @Servicenow/sdk explain *)"
]
},
"enabledPlugins": {
"servicenow-sdk@claude-plugins-official": true
}
}
Ask
If the response to "Summarize what you can do using now-sdk" comes back vague and generic and lacks specific details like "explain", "query", etc. it's probably winging it. Use `/plugin` to confirm that you have the official servicenow-sdk Claude store skill enabled.
That should help get your AI coding agents up to speed even if they don't seem to want it.
Happy coding!