ss-explore-source

ss-explore-source is a skill for Codex from bonnguyenitc/specship. It costs 84 tokens per session (2,970 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for exploring an unfamiliar software project and building a clear map of how it works. It identifies the technology stack, important folders, entry points, and relationships between parts of the code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when joining a project, investigating where a feature is handled, explaining the architecture, or preparing to modify unfamiliar code.
Why use it?
It helps developers understand a codebase before making changes, reducing the risk of editing the wrong area or missing related behavior.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it when joining a project, investigating where a feature is handled, explaining the architecture, or preparing to modify unfamiliar code.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bonnguyenitc/specship/ss-explore-source
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 bonnguyenitc/specship --skill ss-explore-source
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bonnguyenitc/specship

Made for: 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 ss-explore-source

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bonnguyenitc/specship/ss-explore-source.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bonnguyenitc/specship/ss-explore-source)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bonnguyenitc/specship/ss-explore-source"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bonnguyenitc/specship/ss-explore-source.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,970 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.
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 $0.00084 $0.02970
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.01485
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00594
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00297

Measured 7d ago against content hash dadbeb6539db, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ss-explore-source 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 7d 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/ss-explore-source/SKILL.md · 251 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 251 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explore Source

Goal: turn an unfamiliar repo into a clear mental model fast. Read before you change.

When to use

  • A new dev is onboarding and needs the lay of the land.
  • You're asked "how does this work?", "where is X?", "explain the architecture".
  • You're about to modify code in an area you haven't read yet.

Delegate heavy exploration to a subagent

For anything beyond a tiny repo, don't read the whole codebase in the main thread — it floods the context. Spawn the ss-explorer agent if your platform can — it ships with specship for Claude Code (.claude/agents/), prefers the codebase-memory MCP when the project has it, and falls back to plain search — else the built-in Explore agent (or general-purpose for multi-step research), to do the wide fan-out reads and return only conclusions, keeping this thread clean.

  • When: a large/unfamiliar repo, or a broad question ("where is X handled across the codebase?", "what are all the entry points?").
  • How: run the steps below as a brief for the agent. Give it a focused goal and ask for a structured result, not file dumps — e.g. "List every top-level dir with its role and the key entry file (path + entry symbol)" or "Find where auth is enforced; return the call chain."
  • Parallelize independent sweeps (structure, entry points, conventions) as separate agent runs when it speeds things up.
  • Then synthesize the agents' findings into the onboarding docs yourself. You own the writing and the verification — spot-check anything an agent claims before citing it.
  • For a small repo, just do it inline; spawning an agent isn't worth the cold-start cost. Likewise if your platform can't spawn subagents at all: do the full exploration inline in the main thread (../WORKFLOW.md → In-stage subagents — delegation is an optimization, never a precondition).

Method

Work top-down: stack → structure → entry points → data flow → conventions. Don't read every file; read enough to build an accurate map, then verify the gaps.

Read the full file on GitHub · 251 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. 7d ago First seen · 251 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A dadbeb6539db

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ss-explore-source is a skill published in the GitHub repository bonnguyenitc/specship (2 stars, last pushed 29d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 2,970 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 2026-08-31.

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