work-explore

work-explore is a skill for Claude Code from christopherlouet/claude-base. It costs 36 tokens per session (464 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for exploring an existing codebase before changing it. It covers the project structure, technology, architecture, data flow, and coding conventions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to summarize a project's stack, important folders, entry points, architecture, request flow, and development conventions.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of making changes without understanding how the project is organized or how its parts work together.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to summarize a project's stack, important folders, entry points, architecture, request flow, and development conventions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore
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 christopherlouet/claude-base --skill work-explore
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/christopherlouet/claude-base

Made for: Claude Code.

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 work-explore

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore/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 work-explore

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/christopherlouet/claude-base/work-explore.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 464 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 $0.00036 $0.00464
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00232
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00093
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00046

Measured 6d ago against content hash c7204efe3d19, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

work-explore 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 6d 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.

.claude/skills/work-explore/SKILL.md · 96 lines

What it actually says

Explore a Codebase

Goal

Understand a codebase BEFORE modifying it. Never code without having explored.

Instructions

1. Overview (5 min)

# Project structure
ls -la
tree -L 2 -I 'node_modules|.git|dist|build' | head -40

# Configuration
cat package.json | head -30
cat README.md | head -50

Questions to answer:

  • Project type (frontend, backend, fullstack, lib)?
  • Tech stack (languages, frameworks)?
  • How to run the project?

2. Architecture (10 min)

Identify the layers:

  • Entry points (main, index, app)
  • Routes / Controllers
  • Services / Business logic
  • Data access / Models
  • Utilities

Patterns to spot:

  • Architecture (MVC, Clean, Hexagonal)
  • State management
  • Error handling
  • Configuration

3. Data flow

Trace a complete flow:

Request → Validation → Processing → DB → Response

4. Conventions

  • Code style (linter config)
  • Naming (camelCase, snake_case)
  • Test structure
  • Commit format

Expected output

## Project summary

**Type**: [frontend/backend/fullstack]
**Stack**: [languages and frameworks]
**Architecture**: [main pattern]

## Key structure
- `/src/xxx` - [description]
- `/src/yyy` - [description]

## Entry points
- `file.ts:line` - [role]

## Identified conventions
- [Convention 1]
- [Convention 2]

## Sensitive areas
- [Area 1] - [why]

Rules

  • ALWAYS explore before modifying
  • Do not assume — verify in the code
  • Note patterns to reuse them
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. 6d ago First seen · 96 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A c7204efe3d19

Subscribe to this mod's changes

work-explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository christopherlouet/claude-base (5 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 464 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.