eli5

eli5 is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 71 tokens per session (809 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A teaching method for explaining an unfamiliar topic from the beginning with simple words, everyday comparisons, and clear pictures.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create beginner-friendly explanation pages, diagrams, captions, and short introductions to technical subjects.
Why use it?
It removes assumed knowledge and avoids explaining one obscure term with another. It helps make complicated ideas understandable without making them inaccurate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to create beginner-friendly explanation pages, diagrams, captions, and short introductions…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/eli5
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 ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill eli5
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

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 eli5

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/eli5.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/eli5)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/eli5"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/eli5.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 809 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 $0.00071 $0.00809
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00404
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00162
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00081

Measured 3d ago against content hash 7ce678fe19a2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

eli5 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 3d 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/eli5/SKILL.md · 64 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 64 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

eli5 — explain it to someone who knows nothing

The topic is whatever the user named. With no topic named, it is the one the conversation is already on. The audience is someone with zero background: no vocabulary, no context, no patience for a definition that needs another definition.

The contract

  1. A page, not a paragraph. The output is one self-contained HTML page, big visuals first, words second. Open it when it is written.
  2. Picture carries the idea, words label it. If the page still makes sense with the text removed, it is working. Aim for a caption per picture, not a paragraph per picture.
  3. Everyday objects only. Compare to things a person has physically handled: boxes, keys, queues at a counter, post, a light switch. Never explain one unknown with another unknown.
  4. Zero jargon, and zero smuggled jargon. No term appears without being shown first. "It caches" is jargon; "it keeps a copy nearby so it doesn't have to walk back" is the same fact.
  5. Simple, never false. When the simplification would make something untrue, say what got left out, in one line, at the end. A comfortable lie is worse than a hard truth.
  6. No condescension. Simple words, adult tone. The reader is new to the topic, not a child.

The shape of the page

one sentence: what this thing is, in words a stranger would use
big picture 1 : the thing, drawn
big picture 2 : the thing doing its job, step by step
one line      : the part people get wrong
one line      : what this explanation left out (only if it left something out)

Three to five visuals is the whole page. Inline SVG or plain HTML boxes beat any chart library here: the drawing has to be readable on a phone, at a glance, with no legend to study.

open path/to/eli5-<topic>.html

Anti-patterns

Anti-pattern Why it fails Do this instead
Define a term with two more terms The reader loses the thread on line one Show the thing, then name it
A wall of text with one decorative image That is a blog post with a picture Picture first, caption second
"Imagine you're a packet travelling…" Cute framing, still abstract Compare to an object the reader has held
Simplify until it is wrong The reader now has to unlearn it Keep it true and name what you dropped
Baby talk, emoji, exclamation marks Talks down to the reader Plain adult words, short sentences
Five diagrams of the same idea Repetition reads as padding One picture per genuinely new idea

Read the full file on GitHub · 64 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 3d ago First seen · 64 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A 7ce678fe19a2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

eli5 is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (65 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 809 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 2026-09-03.

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