eli5

eli5 is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from melodic-software/claude-code-plugins. It costs 179 tokens per session (2,137 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A visual explainer that teaches one idea at a time with simple diagrams and little text. It first examines the real code or project material before drawing the explanation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for explaining modules, system parts, design choices, incidents, and general concepts through a visual HTML page.
Why use it?
It helps beginners understand relationships and processes that are difficult to follow in prose alone.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the education plugin — 4 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/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/eli5
Any agent
npx skills add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --skill eli5
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install education, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 eli5

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/eli5.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/eli5)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/eli5"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/eli5.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 179 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,137 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 $0.00179 $0.02137
Opus 5 $0.00089 $0.01069
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00427
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00214

Measured yesterday against content hash db2d7fca2519, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

eli5 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 yesterday.

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.

plugins/education/skills/eli5/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Explain one thing as a picture, for a reader assumed to know nothing about it.

The output contract is fixed: a visual HTML explainer that assumes zero prior knowledge: one idea per diagram, minimal text. That contract is what makes this a distinct lane rather than a second prose explainer. education:explain drops altitude and stays in prose; this skill changes the medium, and its floor does not move on request.

The lane exists because the capability ships upstream as a community plugin. This skill delegates to that plugin when the user has it, helps them install it when they do not, and performs the behavior itself either way, so the user is never left with nothing.

Step 1. Ground the object before drawing it

A diagram of a thing you recalled wrongly is a confident, beautiful, wrong answer. Re-read the actual artifact this turn. What that means depends on the object:

Object Grounding pre-pass
A module, file, or subsystem Read the code. Follow its imports and its callers far enough to know what it actually does, not what its name suggests.
A tradeoff or design decision Read the ADRs, the git history, and the pull-request discussion where it was argued. The reasoning lives in the debate, not the result.
An incident Read the writeup and the logs. Reconstruct the sequence before drawing the causal chain.
A general concept Fetch a primary source. Do not draw from parametric memory.

If the grounding pass cannot be done (no access, no such artifact), say so and ask, rather than drawing a plausible diagram of something you did not read.

Step 2. Presence gate

Check whether the upstream eli5 plugin is installed, then take exactly one branch.

Installed → invoke its eli5 skill via the Skill tool (it is addressed eli5:eli5), passing the grounded topic rather than the user's raw phrasing, so the upstream skill works from what Step 1 established. Check the result against the output contract above before returning it. If it comes back without diagrams, or leaning on terms a zero-knowledge reader would not have, treat that as the invocation not succeeding and fall through to the inline pass.

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 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. yesterday First seen · 165 lines · 179 tokens per session scan A db2d7fca2519

Subscribe to this mod's changes

eli5 is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (15 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 179 tokens to every session and 2,137 once invoked, about $0.0009 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 2026-09-03.

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