magazine-explainer

magazine-explainer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills. It costs 196 tokens per session (2,361 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research-and-layout workflow for turning a topic or source material into a print-ready PDF guide for a specific child. It uses magazine-style pages with sections, cards, tables, diagrams, photos, and a closing prompt.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to make a child a guide, explainer, handbook, or write-up about one subject, such as how something works or how to get started.
Why use it?
It helps turn research into a readable, age-appropriate guide without leaving the writing, structure, and visual layout as separate tasks.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Good fit Use it to make a child a guide, explainer, handbook, or write-up about one subject, such as how something works or how to get started.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer
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 hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills --skill magazine-explainer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills

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 magazine-explainer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer/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 magazine-explainer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/magazine-explainer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 196 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,361 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 54
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00196 $0.02361
Opus 5 $0.00098 $0.01180
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.00472
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00236

Measured 12d ago against content hash 420559b4432e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

magazine-explainer 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 7 executable files (scripts/booklet.sh, scripts/fetch_image.sh, scripts/make_booklet.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/magazine-explainer/SKILL.md · 137 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 137 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Magazine-style explainer builder

Turn a topic (or an existing chat / article) into a print-ready PDF explainer that looks like a real kids' magazine feature and reads like a sharp human wrote it for one specific kid. The visual system is proven and bundled; your job is good research, a strong narrative, real photos, and clean prose.

What makes these good

  • One kid, one obsession. Written for a named child at their level, around a single subject. Voice is warm and direct, never dumbed-down.
  • Magazine layout, not a worksheet. A dramatic cover, numbered sections with verb-led titles, cards, comparison tables, "how it works" diagrams, real photographs.
  • Teaches real ideas. Introduce true terminology and define it once (the way a good guide teaches "brushless motor" instead of hiding it). Kids rise to it.
  • Audited prose. No AI slop. Every draft passes the PROSE.md + stop-slop check before render.

Workflow

1. Scope it (ask only what you can't infer)

Settle: the subject, the kid's name and age (drives reading level), the angle (what about the subject — "how X works", "how to get into X", "the wildest X"), and the accent color theme. If a source already exists in the conversation (a chat, an article, notes), build from it. Pick sensible defaults and state them rather than stalling — Tim prefers action over questions.

2. Research

Gather real, correct material — don't wing facts for a kid.

  • Use WebSearch / WebFetch for facts, and the browser (Chrome MCP) when a page is JS-gated.
  • Find real photos: image-search for clean, white-background subject shots, then download them with scripts/fetch_image.sh <url> img/<name>.jpg. Read each downloaded image to confirm it's the right subject and not a logo, 404, or watermark. Save 2–4 good ones into an img/ folder next to where the HTML will live.
  • Plan a mix of photos and diagrams. Photos show what things look like; a custom diagram shows what a photo can't — a labeled cutaway, a to-scale comparison, a process or anatomy. The best issues alternate them. Note which sections want a photo and which want a hand-built SVG diagram (see references/design-system.md → "Photos vs. diagrams" and "Diagrams").
  • Note source quality; flag anything you're unsure of so it can be checked, and keep a light honest disclaimer in the footnote if facts/prices may drift.

Read the full file on GitHub · 137 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 137 lines · 196 tokens per session scan A 420559b4432e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

magazine-explainer is a skill published in the GitHub repository hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills (67 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 196 tokens to every session and 2,361 once invoked, about $0.0010 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 2026-08-30.

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