newcomer-issue-explainer

newcomer-issue-explainer is a skill for Claude Code from apache/magpie. It costs 100 tokens per session (3,644 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A mentoring tool that explains one open good-first-issue, meaning a beginner-suitable repository task, in clear terms without changing the code.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps newcomers understand what the issue asks for, which files to inspect first, what completion looks like, and where to ask questions.
Why use it?
It turns an issue description into a practical starting point and avoids misleading guidance when the issue is closed, security-sensitive, or too vague.

Skill for Claude Code ✓ vendor

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the magpie-mentoring plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps newcomers understand what the issue asks for, which files to inspect first, what completion looks like, and where to ask questions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer
About the project

Apache Magpie is a framework of agent-assisted workflows for maintaining Apache software projects, including issue triage, pull-request review, contributor mentoring, and security-report handling. Apache maintainers and developers use it to delegate repetitive project work to coding agents while retaining human review. Its catalogue entries are the skills, instructions, plugin, and settings that implement these workflows.

apache/magpie · 120 stars · on GitHub · magpie.apache.org

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.

Any agent
npx skills add apache/magpie --skill newcomer-issue-explainer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apache/magpie

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install magpie-mentoring, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 newcomer-issue-explainer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for newcomer-issue-explainer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apache/magpie/newcomer-issue-explainer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,644 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 228
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00100 $0.03644
Opus 5.5 $0.00040 $0.01458
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00020 $0.00729
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00364

Measured 5d ago against content hash 01491a06b951, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

newcomer-issue-explainer 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.

plugins/magpie-mentoring/skills/newcomer-issue-explainer/SKILL.md · 311 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 311 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

newcomer-issue-explainer

Pre-flight — is this project set up?

Do this first, before anything else in this skill, and do it silently. One command answers it and carries its own rules; there is nothing else to read.

Run the checker with this skill's own frontmatter name: and surface_hash:, and one --requires for each requires_config: entry:

PYTHONPATH=".apache-magpie-local:$(git rev-parse --git-common-dir)/../.apache-magpie-local:$(git rev-parse --git-common-dir)/apache-magpie" \
  python3 -m setup_preflight --skill <name> --hash <surface_hash> [--requires <file>]...

The path finds the checker /magpie-setup:setup config installed in the personal layer: this checkout's .apache-magpie-local/, the main checkout's when this is a linked worktree, or the git directory's apache-magpie/ when Magpie is only installed.

  • {"verdict": "ok"} → silent. Continue into the work the user asked for and say nothing about pre-flight. This is the ordinary answer.
  • {"verdict": "action", ...} → each finding names a section, and rules carries that section's text. Follow it. The facts are the inputs; what to propose, and what may not be done, are in the rules rather than here. Act on a finding only through its rules.
  • The command did not run at all — no such module, a non-zero exit, no python3 — → never read that as a pass, and do not re-derive the check by hand: it lives in code so that there is one version of it. If the project has no .apache-magpie.lock, .apache-magpie-overrides/, or personal layer (any of the three directories above), nothing has been set up here and there is nothing to reconcile — resolve this skill's requires_config: entries yourself (first match wins: .apache-magpie-local/<file>, the main checkout's .apache-magpie-local/<file>, <git-common-dir>/apache-magpie/<file>, then .apache-magpie-overrides/<file>), stay silent if they all resolve, and run /magpie-setup:setup config for this skill if any does not, which also installs the checker. Otherwise the project is set up and its checker is missing or stale: say so, propose /magpie-setup:setup config to install it or /magpie-setup:setup upgrade to refresh it, and carry on with the work.

Read the full file on GitHub · 311 lines

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 Changed · +2 lines 01491a06b951
  2. 11d ago Changed · -2 lines · -9 tokens per session 876a926c87b3
  3. 15d ago Changed · +7 lines 2979ef769ea0
  4. 24d ago Changed · +1 lines c65e6423166e
  5. 27d ago Changed · -2 tokens per session 9e77f68d2a5d
  6. 28d ago Changed · -94 lines f7602d5903d3
  7. 1mo ago Changed · +33 lines 92f16524dd19
  8. 1mo ago Changed · +64 lines 6db91b49010f
  9. 1mo ago Changed · +45 lines 5c29eb31eb3c
  10. 1mo ago First seen · 255 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A f2281858118e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

newcomer-issue-explainer is a skill published in the GitHub repository apache/magpie (120 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 3,644 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.