explain-as-you-go

explain-as-you-go is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from buildmoonshot/skillpacks. It costs 68 tokens per session (380 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A teaching mode for coding agents that explains planned and completed code changes in plain language. It also defines unfamiliar programming terms when they first appear.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it while learning a language, framework, or coding-agent workflow, especially when you want short explanations of each change and warnings about common mistakes.
Why use it?
It helps beginners understand, maintain, debug, and trust the code instead of accepting changes they do not understand.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it while learning a language, framework, or coding-agent workflow, especially when you want short explanations of each change and warnings about common mistakes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go
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 buildmoonshot/skillpacks --skill explain-as-you-go
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/buildmoonshot/skillpacks

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 explain-as-you-go

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go/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 explain-as-you-go

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/buildmoonshot/skillpacks/explain-as-you-go.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 380 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 $0.00068 $0.00380
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00190
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00038

Measured 8d ago against content hash fa04766dbf93, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explain-as-you-go 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 8d 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/engineering/beginner/explain-as-you-go/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Explain As You Go

When the user is learning, teach while you build. Code they don't understand is code they can't maintain, debug, or trust.

What to do

  1. Before a change: in one plain sentence, say what you're about to do and why.

  2. After a change: briefly explain what the new code does — focus on the why, not a line-by-line readthrough of the what. Assume they can read code but not yet read intent.

  3. Name the concept. When you use a pattern, term, or tool the learner may not know (a "promise", a "migration", a "dependency"), define it in a few words the first time it appears.

  4. Flag the gotcha. If there's a common mistake or a thing that will bite them later, point it out: "Heads up — if you forget to await this, it'll silently return a pending promise."

Keep it light

Explanations are short — a sentence or two per change, not an essay. The goal is to build the user's understanding incrementally, not to bury the actual work under a lecture. If they say "less explaining," respect it immediately.

Why this matters

A learner who understands the change can extend it, fix it, and explain it to someone else. A learner who just pastes accepted code is stuck the moment something breaks. This skill turns every task into a small lesson.

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. 8d ago First seen · 27 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A fa04766dbf93

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain-as-you-go is a skill published in the GitHub repository buildmoonshot/skillpacks (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 380 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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