explain

explain is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mehrad-dm/mastermind. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,053 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A documentation step for adding usage guidance to public parts of an internal software package, such as a component library, utility library, or internal API. The documentation records how each part works and the rules that are easy to miss.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document package APIs, components, hooks, services, or SDKs for onboarding and future maintenance. It asks for approval and a sample before writing the full set of documents.
Why use it?
It prevents teammates and coding agents from having to guess how undocumented code should be used, especially when the package moves between tools or teams.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mastermind plugin — 23 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook 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/mehrad-dm/mastermind/explain
Any agent
npx skills add mehrad-dm/mastermind --skill explain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mehrad-dm/mastermind

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mastermind, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 23 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

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 explain

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mehrad-dm/mastermind/explain.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mehrad-dm/mastermind/explain)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mehrad-dm/mastermind/explain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mehrad-dm/mastermind/explain.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,053 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 $0.00059 $0.01053
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00526
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00105

Measured 4d ago against content hash cda283f01601, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 4d 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.

skills/explain/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Document Package: make an internal package self-explaining to any model

Most internal packages ship with no usage docs, so every consumer: a teammate, or an AI: reads the source, guesses the intended usage, and gets the gotchas wrong. This skill fixes that: one colocated usage doc per public unit, capturing the API and the non-obvious rules, so the next reader is correct on the first try. It applies to any package: a UI component kit, a utils library, a services/API layer, a hooks package, an internal SDK.

Why it matters for portability: these docs are the layer that makes your package understandable to any model. If you move from one AI tool to another, the new model still understands your package immediately: the knowledge lives in the repo, not in one model's head.

Ask first: always

This writes files into the user's repo. Confirm before doing anything: "I can generate AI-friendly usage docs for <package> so any model (and teammate) understands it correctly: one doc per public unit, with the gotchas. Want me to? (I'll show one sample first.)" Show a sample doc for one unit and get a thumbs-up before fanning out across the package.

Method

  1. Discover the public units. Read the package's public entry (index.ts/exports) for the real list, components, exported functions, hooks, services, classes. Note any existing docs' style and match it.
  2. Never write a line you have not read the source for. For each unit: the implementation, its types, its variants/options, its tests/stories, and one real usage in the codebase. Verify every claim against the code (never document a guess; mark "unverified" or omit).
  3. Write a colocated doc (a README.md/doc beside the unit) with a consistent template:
    • Title + one-line purpose + what it's built on.
    • Signature / API: a table: params/props/args · type · default · description; what it returns.
    • Quick start: the minimal correct usage (real import path).
    • Variants / options / states (where applicable), with a code example each.
    • Composition: how it combines with siblings.
    • Examples: the handful of real scenarios people actually need.
    • Gotchas: the highest-signal section: rules the API doesn't enforce but people get wrong (default values, which state hides what, reserved-but-unimplemented options, ordering constraints).
    • Errors / accessibility / TypeScript: as relevant to the unit's kind.
  4. Prioritize the gotchas. The API table can be inferred from types; the gotchas cannot. That's the value.
  5. Stamp it so drift is detectable. The code is the SSOT; the doc is derived: so record what it was derived from, the way engineering/ROUTER.md records a hash per node. End each doc with a footer naming the source file(s), the repo commit SHA at generation time, and a short content hash of each source (git rev-parse --short HEAD, git hash-object <file>):

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 lines

Files

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.

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 First seen · 62 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A cda283f01601

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository mehrad-dm/mastermind (24 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,053 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 2026-08-30.

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