teach

A command for explaining a design rule in plain language with its reason, evidence, failure case, and a before-and-after example.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to teach rules about accessibility, contrast, motion, form labels, typography, or other interface decisions.
Why use it?
It makes design decisions easier to understand and apply instead of leaving them as unexplained instructions.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/dragoon0x/canon/teach
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Dragoon0x/canon
Per session 18 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 345 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00018 $0.00345
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00172
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00069
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00034

Measured 3d ago against content hash 232de2f39662, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

teach scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

source/commands/teach.md · 53 lines

What it actually says

/teach

Explain why a design rule exists. Not "here's the rule" — "here's the rule, here's what breaks without it, here's the source."

What this does

  1. Identify the rule the user is asking about (e.g., "why 4.5:1 contrast", "why ease-out for entrances", "why labels above inputs").
  2. Find the relevant CANON skill.
  3. Structure the explanation in four parts:
    • The rule: stated plainly, one sentence.
    • The why: the underlying perceptual, cognitive, or accessibility reason.
    • The evidence: citation to the source (WCAG SC, Material 3 spec, HIG section, Refactoring UI chapter, research paper).
    • The failure mode: what happens to real users when the rule is broken.
  4. Include a before/after code example.
  5. Include a one-sentence mnemonic when possible.

Format

Rule: [one sentence]

Why: [2–3 sentences of reasoning]

Evidence: [source with link or citation]

Failure mode: [who gets hurt, how]

Before:
  [bad code or mockup]

After:
  [good code]

Remember: [mnemonic]

Example invocation

"Teach me why line-height should decrease as font size increases."

Success criteria

The reader walks away able to:

  • State the rule.
  • Explain the rule to someone else.
  • Recognize violations in the wild.
  • Point at the source without checking.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 53 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 232de2f39662

Subscribe to this mod's changes

teach is a command published in the GitHub repository Dragoon0x/canon (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 345 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.