b-trees

b-trees is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Arcadi4/nerdy. It costs 50 tokens per session (4,802 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to B-trees, search trees designed to keep many sorted keys in each disk or storage page. It covers their structure, height, splitting, deletion, and use in database indexes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or reviewing database and storage indexes, B-tree variants, page layouts, or insertion and deletion algorithms.
Why use it?
It helps you reason about searches where reading storage pages is more expensive than comparing keys in memory.

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/arcadi4/nerdy/b-trees
Any agent
npx skills add Arcadi4/nerdy --skill b-trees
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Arcadi4/nerdy

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 b-trees

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arcadi4/nerdy/b-trees.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/arcadi4/nerdy/b-trees)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arcadi4/nerdy/b-trees"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arcadi4/nerdy/b-trees.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,802 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 $0.00050 $0.04802
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.02401
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00960
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00480

Measured 4d ago against content hash 742184407d33, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

b-trees 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 4d 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.

clrs/b-trees/SKILL.md · 369 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 369 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

B-Trees

Overview

B-trees are not just high-fanout binary search trees. They teach the external-memory index mindset: choose node size from the block-transfer model, keep height small by packing many ordered separator keys per node, and spend CPU inside a block to avoid extra disk or page accesses.

When applying this chapter in industrial contexts, answer both questions:

  1. Is the bottleneck disk, SSD page, cache block, or CPU comparison work?
  2. Which invariant prevents an insertion or deletion from needing to backtrack up the tree?

Shared CLRS Conventions

Also follow the parent clrs skill for mathematical formatting, theorem preconditions, proof tone, and chapter-skill routing. Put formal bounds in display LaTeX blocks, not inline prose or Markdown table cells.

When to Use

Use this skill for:

  • B-trees, B-plus-trees, B-star-trees, external-memory indexes, database indexes, storage-engine pages, disk blocks, SSD page access, and high-fanout search trees.
  • B-tree definition questions: minimum degree, key counts, child counts, sorted separator keys, equal leaf depth, and root exceptions.
  • B-TREE-SEARCH, B-TREE-CREATE, B-TREE-INSERT, B-TREE-SPLIT-CHILD, B-TREE-SPLIT-ROOT, B-TREE-INSERT-NONFULL, and B-TREE-DELETE reasoning.
  • Comparing B-trees with red-black trees, binary search trees, sorted arrays, hash tables, LSM trees, or platform ordered containers.
  • 2-3-4 tree questions, including join and split exercises.
  • Disk-access versus CPU-time accounting, including block read models and root residency.

Do not use this skill as the primary guide for:

  • Exact lookup with no ordering, range scan, predecessor, successor, or storage-page need; prefer hash-table reasoning.
  • In-memory ordered maps where a standard library tree, skip list, sorted vector, or cache-aware container already solves the problem.
  • Production database implementation details not present in the chapter, such as concurrency control, write-ahead logging, crash recovery, prefix compression, B-link trees, or LSM compaction policy.
  • B-plus-tree leaf-chain semantics unless the prompt explicitly asks for the variant; the chapter's base B-tree keeps satellite information with keys.

Read the full file on GitHub · 369 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. 4d ago First seen · 369 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 742184407d33

Subscribe to this mod's changes

b-trees is a skill published in the GitHub repository Arcadi4/nerdy (7 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 4,802 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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