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.
npx agentmods add skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/hownpx skills add michael-denyer/pstack-claude --skill howgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claudeWhat 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 | $0.00064 | $0.01727 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00032 | $0.00864 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00013 | $0.00345 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00173 |
Grade A, and why
how 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 3d 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.
This is a copy
89% identical to how — 27 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
How
Explore the codebase to answer "how does X work?" questions. Produce clear architectural explanations at the level of a senior engineer onboarding onto a subsystem. Enough to build a working mental model, not annotated source code.
Platform note. On Codex or another non-Claude runtime, the Claude tool names and claude-* slugs named below are Claude defaults. Resolve them via codex-tools.md.
Two modes:
- Explain (default). Explore the codebase and produce a clear explanation
- Critique. Explain first, then spawn multiple models to independently identify architectural issues
Explain Mode
Step 1. Understand the Question and Assess Complexity
Parse what the user is asking about:
- "How does the rate limiter work?", a subsystem
- "How do we handle billing for on-demand usage?", a feature flow
- "How is the auth service structured?", an architectural overview
- "Walk me through what happens when a user submits a form", a runtime trace
Identify the scope. If ambiguous, state your best-guess interpretation before exploring. Don't ask. Let the user redirect if you're off.
Assess complexity to decide the approach:
- Simple (a single module, a small utility, a narrow question like "how does function X work"): skip explorer agents; the explainer explores and explains in a single pass. Go to Step 2b.
- Complex (a subsystem spanning multiple files/services, a cross-cutting feature, a full architectural overview): spawn parallel explorer agents first, then hand off to the explainer. Go to Step 2a.
When in doubt, lean simple. You can always spawn explorers if the explainer hits a wall.
Step 2a. Explore (complex questions only)
Decompose the question into 2-4 parallel exploration angles, each a distinct slice of the subsystem so explorers don't duplicate work. Example split for "how does the rate limiter work?":
- Explorer 1: data model and state management
- Explorer 2: request path and enforcement
- Explorer 3: configuration and metrics infrastructure
What ships with it
4 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.
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.
- 3d ago First seen · 146 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A b9f549760cc4
how is a skill published in the GitHub repository michael-denyer/pstack-claude (142 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 1,727 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to how, differing in 27 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…