how

how is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 128 tokens per session (2,237 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for explaining how an unfamiliar software subsystem or code path works. It covers the architecture, runtime flow, file locations, and important edge cases for an engineer joining the project.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explain a feature flow, subsystem, or placement question, or to critique an existing architecture.
Why use it?
It turns a large or unfamiliar codebase into a usable mental model, so developers can find the right code and understand how changes move through the system.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the team plugin — 86 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks 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/bostonaholic/team/how
Any agent
npx skills add bostonaholic/team --skill how
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 86 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

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 how

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/how.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/how)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/how"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/how.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 128 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,237 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 $0.00128 $0.02237
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.01118
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00447
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00224

Measured yesterday against content hash 5c5045b97116, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

how 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 yesterday.

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/how/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

How — Architectural Explanation

Explore the codebase to answer "how does X work?" Produce the mental model a senior engineer needs to start working in an unfamiliar subsystem — the architecture, the flow, and the sharp edges. Not annotated source code.

Companion to skills/why/SKILL.md: how answers what the code does and how it works; why answers what forces led to its shape. When the user asks about motivation, rejected alternatives, or history, that is why's job.

This skill is read-only. It writes no files, records no artifacts, and changes no state — in this session and in every subagent it dispatches.

Two modes:

  1. Explain (default) — explore and produce a clear explanation.
  2. Critique — explain first, then dispatch fresh-context critics to judge the architecture.

Input

$ARGUMENTS is the question — a subsystem ("the rate limiter"), a feature flow ("what happens when a user submits the form"), or a placement question ("where should this validation live"). Two resolution paths:

  • Given — parse the target and scope directly from the argument.
  • Empty or vague — infer the target from conversation context: open files, recent edits, what was just discussed. State your interpretation in one line before exploring so the user can redirect if you are off. Do not ask first; a stated best guess beats a questionnaire.

Choose the mode from the ask: a request for problems, issues, or improvements ("critique the architecture", "what's wrong with this design") selects Critique; everything else is Explain.

Explain mode

Follow skills/principle-progress-tracking/SKILL.md: when this procedure has two or more steps, seed one todo item per step before starting and mark each complete as you go.

  1. Assess complexity. A single module, one utility, or a narrow "how does function X work" is simple. A subsystem spanning many files or services, a cross-cutting feature flow, or a full architectural overview is complex. When in doubt, lean simple — you can still fan out later if you hit a wall.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 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. yesterday First seen · 203 lines · 128 tokens per session scan A 5c5045b97116

Subscribe to this mod's changes

how is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 128 tokens to every session and 2,237 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-09-03.

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