creating-explainers

A single interactive webpage that explains a topic through prose and hand-built drawings on a canvas, an HTML area for scripted graphics. It is designed to open directly in a browser without a build system or external libraries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to turn source files or researched topics into self-contained explainers with interactive figures. The output uses ordinary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in one file.
Why use it?
It gives readers a visual, interactive way to understand a paper, researched topic, or mixed source material instead of relying on static text alone.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/analyticalmonk/explain-this/creating-explainers
Any agent
npx skills add analyticalmonk/explain-this --skill creating-explainers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/analyticalmonk/explain-this

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,480 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 $0.00098 $0.02480
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01240
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00496
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00248

Measured 2d ago against content hash f7610f31359d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

creating-explainers 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 2d 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/creating-explainers/SKILL.md · 170 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 170 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Creating Explainers

Overview

This skill produces a single self-contained interactive explainer in the style of distill.pub - serif typography, a sticky two-column layout, and hand-built Canvas figures the reader can interact with. The output is one index.html file that opens directly in a browser; no parent project, no build step, no shared infrastructure required.

Core constraints (non-negotiable):

  • Zero dependencies. No npm, no bundler, no React, no D3, no Three.js, no Tailwind. Vanilla HTML + inline CSS + vanilla JS only.
  • One file per article. All CSS in a single <style> block in <head>; all JS at the bottom of <body>. The only external network requests are Google Fonts.
  • Hand-coded Canvas figures, not SVG libraries or images. 3D uses custom projection + z-sorting + lighting (see references/figure-archetypes.md).
  • The voice matters as much as the visuals. Conversational, second-person, analogy-rich. Read references/voice-and-style.md before drafting prose.

If you find yourself reaching for a framework or asking "should I just use React for this", stop. The constraint is the point.

When to Use

Use whenever the user asks to:

  • Turn a paper, blog post, transcript, or research report into a walkthrough
  • Build a distill-style or interactive explainer on any topic
  • "Explain X" with figures the reader can interact with

Don't use for:

  • Static blog posts with no interactivity (just write HTML)
  • Slide decks or presentations
  • Documentation sites or landing pages
  • Anything that needs a build step or framework
  • Explaining a codebase or source files - use explaining-codebases

Intake: Gather Your Source Material

Intake is one phase: gather what the article is built from. The material can be given files, web research, or both. Pick the references that apply and read them when you reach this phase, not upfront.

You have Read Source of truth
Files (paper, URL, paste, transcript, report) references/intake-from-files.md The provided document(s)
Only a topic references/intake-from-research.md Web research, then synthesis
Files and a topic that needs more both Files as spine, research as supporting

Read the full file on GitHub · 170 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files 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. 2d ago First seen · 170 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A f7610f31359d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

creating-explainers is a skill published in the GitHub repository analyticalmonk/explain-this (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 2,480 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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