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.
npx agentmods add skills/ivy00johns/skill-madness/codebase-exploration-loopnpx skills add ivy00johns/Skill-Madness --skill codebase-exploration-loopgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ivy00johns/Skill-MadnessWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00205 | $0.02641 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00102 | $0.01321 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00041 | $0.00528 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00264 |
Grade A, and why
codebase-exploration-loop 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 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.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
codebase-exploration-loop
A configuration of [
loop-controller]. That skill supplies the loop machinery — primitive selection, the full guardrail stack, state externalization. This skill supplies the three things specific to "understand this codebase": the seed-question proof (a default-FAIL question list that only flips on a code citation), the read-only fan-out that maps subsystems in parallel, and the loop-until-dry stop on remaining understanding gaps. Readloop-controllerfor the guardrails; they're inherited, not repeated here.Why
disable-model-invocation: this loop spends tokens fanning out a wave of subagents per iteration, repeatedly, until your questions are answered. It is user-driven — you want to type/codebase-exploration-loopwith your questions, not have Claude silently launch an exploration swarm because you asked a passing question about a file.
The 5-part contract
| Part | This loop |
|---|---|
| trigger | "I don't understand X" about an unfamiliar repo — onboarding, reverse-engineering, or an explicit /codebase-exploration-loop with a list of seed questions |
| action | ONE round: read the gap list → fan out read-only subagents (one per open subsystem/question, parallelism capped) → each returns findings + file:line citations → synthesize into the architecture summary → mark answered questions, surface newly-discovered gaps |
| proof | the architecture summary answers every seed question, each answer citing a path:line (or symbol) in the code, with zero open "I don't understand X" gaps — default-FAIL: every question starts answered: false and flips only on a citation |
| memory | seed-questions.json (the default-FAIL question list + the new gaps each round surfaces) and ARCHITECTURE-SUMMARY.md (the growing synthesis) — durable across rounds; no reliance on conversation memory |
| stop | every question answered: true with a citation OR loop-until-dry (a round surfaces no new gaps and answers nothing new) OR iteration/round cap OR no-progress for 2 rounds OR budget cap |
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.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 180 lines · 205 tokens per session scan A 3f33cb76c7ca
codebase-exploration-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository ivy00johns/Skill-Madness (11 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 205 tokens to every session and 2,641 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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