eli5

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 upstream community eli5 plugin writes a page that does not pass through the escape helper, so this skill builds every page itself.

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. No delegation

Build the page with this skill, whether or not the upstream eli5 plugin is installed. Step 1 hands this skill repository text or a fetched web page, both untrusted, and the upstream skill writes its own page, which does not pass through the escape helper. Do not invoke it, and do not print an install recipe for it.

Step 3. The inline pass

Build the explainer directly, to the same contract.

• One idea per diagram. If a diagram needs a paragraph to be read, it is two diagrams.
• Diagram first, prose second. Each diagram carries a one-line takeaway caption saying what the reader should conclude from it. The caption is the point; the surrounding text is scaffolding.
• Demote the identifiers. Real function, file, and service names belong in parentheses or monospace, after the plain-words version of what the thing does. A zero-knowledge reader cannot use a name they have never seen as the subject of a sentence.
• Diagrams are boxes and arrows. Each diagram is a flow (boxes joined by arrows) or a stack (boxes one above the next), listed as steps. Build a system up across several small diagrams, each adding one box, rather than one crowded diagram.
• Name the styles to leave out. The builder's stylesheet has no italic accent words in headings, numbered "01 / 02 / 03" section labels, or pill-shaped badges. The look is fixed: when the user dislikes it, say so rather than hand-writing a replacement page.