ce-explain

A teaching skill for creating a lasting visual explanation of a concept, change, idea, or recent body of work. It is intended for substantial learning rather than a quick question or routine diagnosis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to learn a technical concept, understand a significant change, or review what happened in a project. It creates an explainer artifact and can support a follow-up check-in.
Why use it?
It helps developers retain understanding when an ordinary chat answer would be too easy to forget. It can also turn a recent work history into a clear recap.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-explain
Any agent
npx skills add EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin --skill ce-explain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,511 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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 $0.00075 $0.02511
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01256
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00502
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00251

Measured 2d ago against content hash c82a84aeb32e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

ce-explain scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 2d 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.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

chmod 700 "$SCRATCH_ROOT" || exit 1;
skills/ce-explain/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Explain It To Me

Teach the user one thing well: a concept, a change, an idea, or a window of their own recent work. Agent-driven development removed the learning that writing code by hand used to provide; this skill is the replacement. What to explain is the input this skill was invoked with, present in the current prompt or conversation — whether the user asked directly or a calling skill passed it.

Done: a durable artifact exists at $RUN_DIR, the user has seen it, the destination they chose has been honored (or declined), and any check-in they accepted has been run and corrected. A run that correctly ends without an artifact — the operational-question gate answered it in chat, an empty window, a bare invocation the user did not answer — is equally done.

Note: The current year is 2026. Use this when weighting external sources and dating artifacts.

Read references/orchestration.md before the first blocking question, subagent dispatch, or run-directory creation — it owns the per-harness ask tool, the model tiers and their degradation rule, grounding by input shape, and menu sizing.

Artifact Root

An explainer lands under <root>/explainers/ only when archived to the repo, and learnings may be read under <root>/solutions/. Resolve <root> only when you compose such a path; a scratch-only or external-concept run never composes one. Pass the resolved path to any subagent, not the config.

Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.

  • Read docs_root from <repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml only (<repo-root> = git rev-parse --show-toplevel). Do not read it from config.local.yaml. Unset -> <root> is docs, exactly as before.
  • Validate a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under .git/. Otherwise stop with an error naming docs_root and the value -- never fall back to docs.
  • Use <root> as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as <root>/<subdir> with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read docs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. 2d ago First seen · 87 lines · 75 tokens per session scan B c82a84aeb32e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce-explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,760 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 2,511 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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