What is explainer-formats?

A skill for turning explanations of topics, codebases, processes, or documents into plain technical prose, diagrams, standalone HTML pages, or narrated videos. It supports Simplified Technical English, a controlled form of English with short and consistent sentences.

Use it when you need a structured explanation in prose, a diagram, an HTML page, or a narrated video.

It provides defined formats and writing rules instead of leaving the explanation style unspecified.

explainer-formats — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by koolamusic

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 koolamusic/claudefiles --skill explainer-formats

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/koolamusic/claudefiles

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/koolamusic/claudefiles/explainer-formats.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 202 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,112 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00202	$0.02112
Opus 5.5	$0.00081	$0.00845
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00040	$0.00422
Haiku 4.5	$0.00020	$0.00211

Measured 9d ago against content hash 2cabbd737a64, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explainer-formats 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 7 executable files (scripts/chromium.sh, scripts/diagram.sh, scripts/doctor.sh, …), 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/explainer-formats/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.

Explainer formats

One command, four output formats (rungs), ordered from cheapest to most expensive:

Rung	Output	Reference to load	Status
`ste`	Prose rewritten in Simplified Technical English at a chosen strictness	`references/ste-rules.md`; `references/ste-dictionary.md` at strict (and for substitutions at 80%)	ready
`diagram`	A Mermaid or SVG figure in chat, or an animated diagram file from the visualizer (42 types, exportable to SVG, PNG, GIF, MP4), with an STE caption	`references/diagram.md`	ready
`html`	A standalone explainer page, published as an artifact or a public page	`references/html.md`	ready
`video`	A narrated Manim video, one scene per beat, published as an artifact player page	`references/video.md`; `scripts/` pipeline run as `uv run --project scripts python scripts/<file>.py`	ready

If a rung's reference file does not exist yet, say so in one line and fall back to the highest rung below it that is ready.

Invocation

Both forms mean the same thing:

/explain <topic> [--as <format>] [--level strict|80|light]
explain <topic> as <format>

/explain is the explain command in ~/.claude/commands/; it loads this skill and passes its arguments through. The natural form ("explain the checkout flow as a sequence diagram", "explain this as STE") is parsed the same way: the last as <format> names the format, the rest is the topic. Defaults: --as ste, --level light. <topic> is anything the reader points at: a question, a pasted paragraph, a file path, a function name, a feature. When the topic is a file or symbol, read it first and explain what is there, not what it is named.

<format> is a rung (ste, diagram, html, video) or any visualizer type name (architecture, sequence, sankey, flowchart, er, timeline, ... all 42 are in references/formats.md). A type name routes to the diagram rung with that type fixed, so "explain X as sankey" means a visualizer sankey of X. mermaid and svg are accepted too and keep the figure in chat.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 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.

9d ago Changed · +13 lines · +67 tokens per session 2cabbd737a64
12d ago First seen · 74 lines · 135 tokens per session scan A 40fae7cfbcdc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explainer-formats is a skill published in the GitHub repository koolamusic/claudefiles (130 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 202 tokens to every session and 2,112 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-06.

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