c4

c4 is a skill for Claude Code from me2resh/apexyard. It costs 41 tokens per session (5,845 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool that reads a codebase and creates C4 architecture diagrams in Mermaid. C4 is a way to show a system's users, major applications, and internal building blocks at different levels.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document a project's system context and containers, refresh diagrams after major changes, or generate Structurizr DSL when more detailed component diagrams are needed.
Why use it?
It saves developers from manually rebuilding architecture diagrams after learning or changing a project.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; positional $N argument; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to document a project's system context and containers, refresh diagrams after major changes, or generate Structurizr DSL when more detailed component diagrams are needed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4
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 me2resh/apexyard --skill c4
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/me2resh/apexyard

Made for: Claude Code.

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 c4

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4/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 c4

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/me2resh/apexyard/c4.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,845 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: 2 findings, 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 MCP Rug Pull · line 254
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 340
    Docker image references without a specific tag (:latest is implicit) or digest (@sha256:...) can be silently replaced by a malicious image.
    Fix: Pin the image: image:tag or image@sha256:abc123
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 $0.00041 $0.05845
Opus 5.5 $0.00016 $0.02338
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00008 $0.01169
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00585

Measured 4d ago against content hash 69853fbf9ff2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

c4 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (lint-dsl.sh, lint.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.

.claude/skills/c4/SKILL.md · 387 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 387 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing: read docs/skills/shared/writing-rule.md before you write a durable artifact.

/c4 — Generate C4 Architecture Diagrams

Reads the target project's codebase and produces filled-in Level 1 (System Context) and Level 2 (Container) diagrams as Mermaid markdown. Saves the slog of filling in the templates by hand for a repo you already understand structurally.

This skill complements /handover (which seeds a stub L2 once at onboarding). Use /c4 whenever the architecture changes substantially and the diagrams need a refresh — or for a project that wasn't onboarded via /handover.

For projects that hit Mermaid's ceiling — L3 (component) precision, auto-zoom across levels, tags/perspectives — pass --dsl to emit a Structurizr DSL workspace instead. See "Escape hatch: Structurizr DSL (L3+)" below.

Path resolution

Read the registry path via portfolio_registry, the per-project docs dir via portfolio_projects_dir, and the ideas backlog via portfolio_ideas_backlog — all from .claude/hooks/_lib-portfolio-paths.sh. Source the helper at the top of any bash block that touches those paths:

source "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.claude/hooks/_lib-read-config.sh"
source "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.claude/hooks/_lib-portfolio-paths.sh"
registry=$(portfolio_registry)

Defaults match today's single-fork layout (./apexyard.projects.yaml, ./projects, ./projects/ideas-backlog.md). Adopters in split-portfolio mode override the portfolio.{registry, projects_dir, ideas_backlog} keys in .claude/project-config.json. Don't hardcode literal apexyard.projects.yaml or projects/ paths in bash blocks — the helper resolves whichever mode the adopter is in. See docs/multi-project.md.

Usage

/c4                                    # current cwd, both levels
/c4 sample-app                         # registered project, both levels
/c4 sample-app --level=1               # only the L1 system-context diagram
/c4 . --level=2                        # only the L2 container diagram for cwd
/c4 sample-app --force                 # overwrite existing diagrams
/c4 sample-app --dsl                   # Structurizr DSL escape hatch (L3+), instead of Mermaid
/c4 sample-app --dsl --force           # overwrite an existing workspace.dsl

Read the full file on GitHub · 387 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 4d ago Changed · -2 lines 69853fbf9ff2
  2. 11d ago Changed 681531f1967b
  3. 1mo ago Changed · +4 lines 06b12948cbf3
  4. 1mo ago First seen · 385 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 689a6e7ed951

Subscribe to this mod's changes

c4 is a skill published in the GitHub repository me2resh/apexyard (533 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 5,845 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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