explain-plainly

explain-plainly is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aethrox/doctrine. It costs 81 tokens per session (904 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for explaining technical work to readers who may not know the field’s vocabulary. It defines unfamiliar terms in plain words and uses an existing project glossary when one is already in scope.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing documentation, explanations, or updates for non-technical readers, especially when a technical term needs a short definition on first use.
Why use it?
It makes explanations understandable without requiring the reader to look up technical language. This is useful when information must be shared outside the technical team.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the doctrine plugin — 33 skills shipped together

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 skills/aethrox/doctrine/explain-plainly
Any agent
npx skills add aethrox/doctrine --skill explain-plainly
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aethrox/doctrine

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install doctrine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 33 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for explain-plainly

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aethrox/doctrine/explain-plainly.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aethrox/doctrine/explain-plainly)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aethrox/doctrine/explain-plainly"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aethrox/doctrine/explain-plainly.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 904 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 $0.00081 $0.00904
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00452
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00181
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00090

Measured 5d ago against content hash 691190484c7a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explain-plainly 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 5d 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.

skills/explain-plainly/SKILL.md · 37 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 37 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explain Plainly

Most technical writing defaults to precision for an audience that already has the vocabulary, then gets awkwardly simplified after someone gets lost. This skill's defining constraint, from ISO 24495-1's plain language principles: plain framing is the default posture for a non-technical audience, not a fallback reached for only after confusion is signaled. This is the same standard wait-what uses, applied differently: wait-what triggers reactively, after a specific explanation has already failed to land; this skill is the proactive default for anything explained to someone outside the technical team. When a project already has a persistent glossary owned by domain-modeling, this skill uses that artifact rather than creating a separate one.

Phase 1: Default to no unexplained jargon

Assume the reader does not already hold the vocabulary. Define a technical term inline the first time it appears in a given piece of writing, in a plain clause the reader would not need to look up. If a persistent project document is already in scope and the repository has an existing glossary convention, route the term there under Phase 3 when a full definition would derail the sentence. Do not wait for a confusion signal before doing this; treat unexplained jargon as a default defect, not an edge case. Write the explanation without em dashes, using a comma, colon, period, or a reworded sentence instead.

Phase 2: Frame from the reader's stake, not the mechanism

Lead with what changes for the reader (what they can now do, what risk is gone, what decision this enables), not with how the underlying system works. A reader outside the technical team rarely needs the mechanism to act on the information; they need to know what it means for them. Explain the mechanism only when the reader's own next decision actually depends on it.

Phase 3: Use an existing glossary only when it is in scope

For an ordinary chat explanation, explain terms inline and do not create or edit a glossary. Update a glossary only when a persistent project document is already in scope for the current task and an existing repository convention authorizes the write, such as domain-modeling's CONTEXT.md or equivalent. If no such convention exists, do not invent GLOSSARY.md; keep the definition inline. When the convention does exist, consume its established terms and add an authorized entry there rather than maintaining a separate glossary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 37 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 5d ago First seen · 37 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 691190484c7a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain-plainly is a skill published in the GitHub repository aethrox/doctrine (18 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 904 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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