beacon-explain

beacon-explain is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Juliocbm/beacon-docs. It costs 62 tokens per session (1,810 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that displays the full explanation for a Beacon lint rule, health check, or add-on item. Beacon is a project tool that checks documentation and workflow conventions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need details about a particular Beacon rule or check. It is invoked with a term such as a lint rule name.
Why use it?
It gives the exact explanation maintained by the command-line tool, including what the item means and how to address it, instead of relying on a shortened summary.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the beacon plugin — 6 skills shipped together

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/juliocbm/beacon-docs/beacon-explain
Any agent
npx skills add Juliocbm/beacon-docs --skill beacon-explain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Juliocbm/beacon-docs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install beacon, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

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 beacon-explain

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliocbm/beacon-docs/beacon-explain.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliocbm/beacon-docs/beacon-explain)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliocbm/beacon-docs/beacon-explain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliocbm/beacon-docs/beacon-explain.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,810 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00062 $0.01810
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00905
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00362
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00181

Measured 3d ago against content hash 4149decfe03b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

beacon-explain 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.

claude-plugin/skills/beacon-explain/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/beacon:beacon-explain <term>

Renders the verbose explanation for a Beacon lint rule, doctor check, or plugin-contributed item. The CLI is the source of truth — this skill is a thin wrapper that picks the right CLI subcommand and presents the output faithfully.

The faithful-rendering rule (the most important rule)

Render the CLI's --explain output verbatim in a code block. Do NOT paraphrase, summarize, reshape, or add commentary.

The user invoked --explain. That word is the spec: they want the explanation, not your remix of it. Your training knowledge about kebab-case naming, ADR conventions, or doctor patterns is almost certainly less precise than what the CLI maintainer wrote into the rule's summary/why/fix fields.

✅ CORRECT response shape:
   "Here's `beacon lint --explain kebab-case`:"

[verbatim CLI output, ~30 lines]


❌ WRONG response shapes:
- "The kebab-case rule means filenames must be lowercase..."  (paraphrase)
- "**What it checks:** ... **Why:** ... **Fix:** ..."          (reshape)
- "This rule is common because URLs are case-sensitive..."     (commentary from training)

The user can ALWAYS ask for a summary afterward ("summarize that in 2 lines") — give them the raw first, summarize only on request.

Decision tree

User invoked /beacon:beacon-explain <args>?
  │
  ├─ <args> is empty → ALL-CATALOG mode (see below)
  │
  └─ <args> has a term →
       │
       ├─ Term obviously names a lint rule (suffix-location, kebab-case, etc.) → lint first
       ├─ Term obviously names a doctor check (stale-plans, proposed-adrs, etc.) → doctor first
       └─ Ambiguous / unknown → PARALLEL both in one message

Pattern A — Term provided (the common case)

Run both beacon lint --explain <term> and beacon doctor --explain <term> in parallel (single message with two Bash tool calls). They're both read-only, both cheap, and parallel dispatch eliminates the wasted turn of sequential lint-then-doctor.

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 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. 3d ago First seen · 132 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 4149decfe03b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beacon-explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository Juliocbm/beacon-docs (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,810 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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